AI Safety Entrepreneurship Hackathon

This hackathon is made possible by the generous support of Lambda Labs, providing essential computing resources for AI safety innovation.

Why This Hackathon Matters:

‍The impact of real-world startups is immense and can be felt almost immediately. We need to push AI safety innovations toward real-world applications rapidly to ensure they are implemented and make a real difference in the application and deployment of AI technologies. This hackathon is not just about ideation; it's about taking that crucial first step from concept to a plan for action, setting the stage for future development.

What to Expect:

• Collaborate with Like-Minded Innovators: Work with a diverse group of participants from both the science and business worlds. This is your chance to meet potential co-founders and collaborators who share your vision for the future of AI safety.
• From Concept to Blueprint: Move beyond research papers and ideas. Develop tangible solutions that can be refined and scaled into full-fledged products or startups in the future.
• Support from Experts: Receive mentorship from leading experts in AI safety, entrepreneurship, and technology commercialization. Learn what it takes to develop your ideas and how to plan for their success.
• Real-World Impact: We're looking for solutions that can serve as the foundation for real-world applications. Whether it's a new tool for alignment, a product to enhance multi-agent safety, or a platform to secure AI infrastructure, your work here could have a direct impact on the safe development and deployment of AI.
• Looking Ahead: As you work on your projects, keep in mind that this is just the beginning. We're in the process of preparing an incubator program, Pathfinders, designed to provide even more support for the most promising teams
• Computing Resources: Thanks to the generous support of Lambda Labs, each team will receive $400 in compute credits to build and test their solutions

🙋‍♀️ FAQ

What will I submit during this weekend?

You submit a 4-page white paper that describes how your research innovation solves a key real-world problem in a multi-agent super intelligence future, whichever technology it is based on. If your research truly solves a real-world problem, commercial viability will simply be a question of engineering and you can ignore that for this hackathon.

How will I find a team?

Before the hackathon, we have brainstorming sessions where we will collaborate to figure out the highest impact research ideas to work on. We highly recommend that you connect with others during these sessions and coordinate around specific categories of ideas that excite you. We try to set the stage by defining the problems we need to solve and let you take charge on the idea generation process.

What is the Seldon accelerator program?

It is an incubation project for executing technical research in the real world with for-profit organizations towards making a large impact on the real world. We're currently developing this in collaboration with our community and would love to hear your ideas, thoughts, and ways we can make it a success with you!

How can I win the prizes?

We have a prize pool of $2,000 to share with you! People with established backgrounds in research-focused startups will be reviewing your projects and review your project about a technical idea that can scale on three criteria:

• Research quality & scalability: What is the quality of the technical innovation? Will the research idea scale into an impactful intervention in the real world?
• AI safety: Are the arguments for how this technical idea solves a key future challenge for AI risk good? Have the authors described the threat model they're aiming to solve with this project?
• Methods: Will this intervention really work? Have the authors explored an example situation where this intervention will solve the problem?

Top teams will win a share of our $2,000 prize pool:

• 🥇 1st place: $1,000
• 🥈 2nd place: $600
• 🥉 3rd place: $300
• 🎖️ 4th place: $100

Additionally, top entrepreneurs might receive the opportunity to:

• 🏆 Join the Seldon entrepreneur-in-residence program

Also, all participating teams receive:

• $400 in Lambda Labs compute credits for development and testing

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What kind of projects are suitable for this hackathon?

Projects that address AI safety challenges through technical solutions that could be developed into startups. Examples include monitoring systems, evaluation frameworks, safety layers for AI deployment, and infrastructure security solutions.

Q: What should the final submission include?A: A 4-page white paper that describes:

• The problem and why it's important
• Your proposed solution
• Pilot experiments or demo
• Implementation risks and mitigation strategies

Do I need experience in AI safety to join?

Not at all! This can be an occasion for you to learn more about AI safety and entrepreneurship. We provide code templates and ideas to kickstart your projects, mentors to give feedback on your project, and a great community of interested researchers and developers to give reviews and feedback on your project.

‍Q: Can I work on an idea similar to existing companies?‍

Yes, you can work on similar ideas if you can demonstrate unique value or improvements. The focus should be on solving real problems rather than just competing with existing solutions.

Q: How do office hours work?

Office hours are scheduled throughout the hackathon where participants can get feedback from industry experts and mentors on their projects.

Join Us

‍This hackathon is for anyone who is passionate about AI safety and entrepreneurship. Whether you're an AI researcher, developer, entrepreneur, or simply someone with a great idea, we invite you to be part of this ambitious journey. Together, we can build the tools and products needed to ensure that AI is developed and deployed safely.

Let's turn cutting-edge research into actionable solutions. Let's build the future of AI safety, together.

AI Assurance Technology Report

We are happy to invite Kristian Rönn as a speaker at this event. He is the co-founder of a new stealth startup, the ex-founder of a 200 person company for carbon emission governance, and a co-author on the AI Assurance Technology Report.

We highly recommend skimming at least the executive summary of the report.

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Useful articles

• Some for profit AI Alignment Org ideas
• There Should Be More Alignment-Driven Startups
• AI Safety as a YC Startup

Hackathon for Technical AI Safety Startups September 2024

Keynote talk & HackTalk:

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This talk by a YCombinator startup founder Lukas Petersson provides invaluable insights into building AI safety startups, covering crucial aspects like market validation, scaling challenges, and balancing profit with impact. The speaker shares practical advice on customer acquisition, pricing strategies for small market sizes, and navigating the unique challenges of AI safety businesses. Particularly valuable for hackathon participants is his discussion of turning theoretical safety concepts into viable businesses while maintaining mission alignment.

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This keynote from Esben Kran provides essential strategic context for building AI safety startups, explaining why 2024 is a critical time for development, and outlines various promising areas like security interventions, automated evaluations, and infrastructure solutions. The talk offers valuable insights into balancing profit with impact, navigating governance challenges, and leveraging the uniquely collaborative AI safety community while building technically ambitious solutions.

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Winning Projects and what we can learn from them:

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AI Safety Collective (3rd Place)

• Created a platform for crowdsourcing solutions to AI safety challenges
• Bridges the gap between industry AI safety demands and untapped talent
• Uses a bounty system similar to cybersecurity platforms
• Particularly valuable for addressing immediate industry safety needs while building towards more critical challenges

Simulation Operators (2nd Place)

• Developed simulation platforms for testing and verifying robot safety
• Focuses on cyber-physical systems and real-world AI deployment
• Creates tools for human supervision of AI agents
• Addresses the growing need for safety verification in robotics integration

AI Identity Systems (4th Place)

• Built cryptographic identity system for AI models
• Enables traceability and accountability of AI actions
• Works for both self-hosted and server-side models
• Uses innovative cryptographic techniques for verification

Dark Forest (1st Place)

• Created system for defending web authenticity
• Uses graph neural networks to detect AI-generated content
• Addresses content authenticity crisis and platform trust
• Innovative approach to maintaining open discourse online

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Compute Resources from Lambda Labs

Thanks to the generous support of Lambda Labs, each participating team will receive $400 in compute credits to each team.
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Lambda Labs Technical Guides

• Serving Large Language Models (LLM 3.1 8B/70B) using vLLM - Perfect for projects involving model deployment and serving
• Running Hugging Face Transformers & Diffusers - Great for projects using foundation models
• Guide to 1-Click Clusters for distributed training - For projects requiring multi-GPU setups

The schedule runs from 4 PM UTC Friday to 3 AM Monday. We start with an introductory talk and end the event during the following week with an awards ceremony. Join the public ICal here.You will also find Explorer events, such as collaborative brainstorming and team match-making before the hackathon begins on Discord and in the calendar.