Our Mission

Why are we doing this?

We are concerned that AI poses an existential risk, and 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 – having surpassed humans in domains such as chess and video games, they are now growing to rival them in domains such as art, communication and verbal reasoning. In particular, the rise of language models such as ChatGPT has thrown a spotlight onto the field of generative AI. 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 think there is benefit to be found in structured bootcamp-style course with exercises and pair-programming. We also think there are advantages to a more open-ended curriculum of individual investigation and implementation.

In this course, 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 more project-focused material, where participants explore a particular topic in greater depth, with TA supervision.

We also believe that there are benefits from having a single location in which multiple people come together and study, which is why 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, networking, and possible future collaboration.

Our long-term aims:

Following the success of ARENA’s previous iterations, we plan to continue running iterations in the future – if you’d like to attend, please register your interest here. ARENA’s overall mission is to provide talented individuals with the ML engineering skills, community, and confidence to contribute directly to technical AI safety.

If you’re interested in mentoring, applying or funding us, then please reach out!