We aim to provide talented individuals with the ML engineering skills, community, and confidence to contribute directly to technical AI safety.
Why are we doing this?
We are concerned that powerful AI poses an existential risk.
We believe that positively shaping the future of AI development is one of the most impactful things people can do right now.
Advanced ML systems are playing an increasingly important role in the world. Despite this, much of what goes on inside these powerful AI systems is still a mystery to us.
We believe that more high-quality work in fields such as interpretability, LLM evaluations, and adversarial robustness can help alleviate this problem.
Through our work, we hope to reduce the existential risk that advanced AI poses to humanity.
How are we doing this?
We believe that when learning, collaboration is priceless.
We run structured bootcamp-style course with exercises and pair-programming, teaching people the ML engineering skills to contribute to AI alignment research. We also believe there are advantages to an open-ended curriculum of individual investigation and implementation.
In our courses, we hope to combine the benefits of both.
We open each chapter of content with pair programming based on a set of coding exercises (designed to help people develop their understanding of the material), and then transition into project-focused material, where participants explore a particular topic in depth with TA supervision.
We’re running this course in the LISA workspace in London. This space is also shared with many other technical programmes and researchers, which we’ve found provides opportunity for productive discussion, building relationships, and collaboration.
Our long-term aims:
We envision a future in which humans and advanced AI systems coexist in harmony.
Following the success of ARENA’s previous iterations, we plan to continue running iterations in the future. If you’re interested in applying to these, please register your interest here.
How can I help?
If you resonate with our mission, we’d love to hear from you!
There are plenty of ways to get involved with ARENA – you can self-study our materials, join our Slack community, or apply to attend our in-person programme. However you choose to get involved, we’d be delighted to hear from you.
If you’re interested in funding us, please get in touch.