Dear Apart Community,

Welcome to our newsletter - Apart News!

At Apart Research there is so much brilliant research, great events, and countless community updates to share.

In this week's Apart News we have a *brand new* video edition of our Researcher Spotlight series.

​Researcher Spotlight: Jacob Haimes

01. Tell us a little about where you're from?

"Hi, my name is Jacob Haimes and I am from Boulder, Colorado, which is right at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. I grew up here in Boulder and when I was applying for colleges, I only applied to one because I knew I wanted to go to CU Boulder."

"So I went there for undergrad in mechanical engineering and then I did my master's in computational modeling, also through the mechanical engineering department, but focused on optimization and I had a minor in computer science as well."

02. When did you get interested in AI safety?

"So about half a year or so after starting my first job out of college, I started thinking basically like, this is okay. It was healthcare information systems. Yeah. And I liked that I was doing positive impact, but I felt like I could be using my technical skills more and that I could be potentially doing more, I guess, as well."

"And so I did a retrospective or like a reflection. That's what I was looking for. Reflection on what I wanted to do and what mattered to me. [...] I felt that I could be doing a lot more for my community. "

"AI was taking off quickly, but was still nascent, and if I started working on these things now, I could have a potentially like very outsized impact as defining the paradigms that exist within a field as it's being created is probably going to have pretty long-term effects."

03. When did you first hear about Apart Research?

"So this would have been in around November of 2023 when I first heard about Apart and I was just attending some talks at an EAGx virtual and Esben who's one of the co-founders of Apart was the one who started working on this project."

"And he was giving a talk on, I think it was actually called 'Let's Get Into AI Safety', which at that point was already the name of my podcast. So I attended that and he signposted that a hackathon was happening in the next week, it was on evaluations and I basically thought like this seems like an opportunity. This is the community that I'm interested in."

"This is in the area that I'm more interested in, especially at that point. And I mean, we both chose basically the same name, so that's gotta mean something, and that's how I first learned about Apart."

[Questions 05-08]

09. Any hobbies?

"Well, things have gotten a little bit more, uh, busy recently because I, I am working with Apart and Kairos FM with that, which I'm hosting two podcasts. And then I also do some work with the Odyssean Institute, um, on, on some more governance, uh, democratic process, uh, research, but bringing that to AI and, and AI governance..."

"I love role-playing games. Um, so sorry, uh, the person interviewing me just did a very weird hand gesture at me... I love role-playing games, so things like Dungeons and Dragons, but also, uh, other ones like Blades in the Dark, uh, Grimwild, um, anything really, uh, I do a lot of DMing as well. So some people might consider that to be less, uh, like more work after I'm done with work, but I, I think it's just so, so fun."

Want to read or watch the full episode? We have the full write-up here + the YouTube video here.

Jacques' Cursor Masterclass

Jacques Thibodeau (@JacquesThibs) gave Apart a masterclass in Cursor. We recorded it for you. It includes a look at Cursor's key features: best practices for AI-assisted coding; using Composer for rapid multi-file creation; effective prompting techniques; designing AI rules for optimal results. These talks are perfect for anyone interested in boosting their coding productivity and leveraging AI in their workflow. Watch the YouTube video!

Opportunities

• Never miss a Hackathon by keeping up to date here.
• Google DeepMind India is hiring for multiple open positions in its Pre-doctoral Researcher (AI Resident) program.
• The UK's AISI has extended their deadline for the bounty programme for model autonomy evaluations and agent scaffolds to 14 December.
• Anthropic AI Safety Fellow applications (London) have opened and may be interesting to our readers.​

Have a great week and let’s keep working towards safe and beneficial AI.