Building Bridges for AI Safety: Proposal for a Collaborative Platform for Alumni and Researchers

Personally, I would love to see this succeed - I appreciate the emphasis on community-driven decision-making and resource sharing. The market research questionnaire should provide a solid foundation for building a platform that users would want to use. It is unclear the extent to which users would adopt this over existing alumni initiatives. It would be helpful to explore in more detail how the platform will be sustained and maintained in the long term, as this is often an issue with similar initiatives. I would also recommend establishing a system for reviewing and curating resources and knowledge shared on the platform to maintain its integrity and relevance.

There are various programs that are launched by various fieldbuilders to solve this problem already. They have existing communities and opportunities for these people to join. In fact, a bigger challenge has been finding enough good talent to join them.

This proposal aims to start The AI Safety Society, a centralized platform to support alumni of AI safety programs (like SPAR, MATS, and ARENA) and independent researchers. The author highlights some post-training challenges that the authors face, such as limited resource access, fragmentation, and mentorship, leading to decreased talent retention. AI Safety Society aims to bridge the gap by providing further academic and networking opportunities, and support towards fostering soft skills and encouragement of good community members. This would be done by collaborating with institutions with active AI safety groups and providing additional resources and mentoring opportunities, fostering a global collaboration network.

This is a great initiative and would be beneficial for the AI safety community on a global scale. I want to point out that due to the nature of the initiative geared towards community building and providing access to resources, a non-profit business model might be better suited for this initiative. Further details on the estimate of the budget and potential funding agencies and grants would also have strengthened the proposal.

I definitely agree with the premise that there are many folks going through these programs who ultimately end up in a limbo afterwards without finding a full-time postion. I am not sure though if making these folks more comfortable afterwards is the right approach. If you would want to be cynical you could frame your platform as like the "wellfare for underperforming AIS researchers". So I wouldnt want to have these folks just hanging around and socializing after their programs, but rather they should as quickly as possible go out and do something, they should try hard to find a full-time position, become an independent researcher (maybe the platform could help here somewhat), or better even, they should start their own orgs, and hire AIS folks and make the whole ecosystem larger. So maybe if you could frame your platform as like an interims solution that really gives them this perspective of "Try your hardest to apply at these impactful positions, go do research independently and use these resources for getting funding etc., or start your own org by doing e.g. catalyze" then I would be onboard and see good potential. Just spending money for people to linger around for longer doesnt seem helpful.