Upcoming Events

  • AI Safety Thursdays: Can AI solve its own alignment problem?

    Thursday, August 7th, 6:00pm - 9:00pm

    ​Several labs are talking about building superintelligence, but can it be made safe with the tools that we have? What if we had weakly superhuman AGI to help us?

    ​In this talk, Giles Edkins will explore some of the projects, ideas, and counterarguments in the quest to use AI to align AI.

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  • AI Policy Tuesdays: China's Global AI Governance Action Plan

    Tuesday, August 12th, 6:00pm - 9:00pm

    China's new "Global AI Governance Action Plan" puts forth their take on advancing global AI development and governance.

    ​Ajay Nandalall, who recently took us through the American plan, will explore how the two plans compare, and what changes these documents may drive .

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  • AI Safety Thursdays: Biorisks from AI

    Thursday, August 14th 6pm - 8pm

    ​David Atanasov will speak about AI models' potential to increase human capabilities in biological scientific tasks and how this might increase certain biological risks.

    ​We'll discuss what is being done about this and future plans for mitigating these risks.

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  • AI Policy Tuesdays: Does AI diffusion undermine the US-China race?

    Tuesday, August 19th 6pm - 8pm

    ​Pushing to develop transformative AI as fast as possible risks catastrophe—a concern often met with the objection that “if we don’t do it, China will.” This “but China” objection often doesn’t give much consideration to diffusion: the speed and way in which AI is integrated into the military and economy. Wim Howson Creutzberg will explore how diffusion might change the stakes of racing towards transformative AI.

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  • AI Safety Thursdays: Can we make LLMs forget? An Intro to Machine Unlearning

    Thursday, August 21st 6pm - 8pm

    ​LLMs are pre-trained on a large fraction of the internet. As a result, they can regurgitate private, copyrighted, and potentially hazardous information.

    ​Lev McKinney will guide us through machine unlearning in LLMs—how models retain facts, methods for identifying influential training data, and techniques for suppressing predictions.

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  • AI Policy Tuesdays: The Effects of Synthetic Data on Power Structures

    Thursday, August 29th 6pm - 8pm

    ​Savannah Harlan explores how the rise of synthetic data is redrawing the boundaries of power at three levels: between governments and the public, between ordinary people and corporations, and between humanity and artificial intelligence itself.

    ​We'll finish by examining whether synthetic data is likely to increase x-risk as we shift more of the work of alignment onto the models themselves.

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  • AI Safety Thursdays: How You Can Help Steer Us Toward a Positive AGI Future

    Thursday, August 28th, 6:00pm - 9:00pm

    ​Many of our recent events have covered plausible scenarios where the development of highly advanced AI leads to very bad outcomes for humans.

    ​At this event, Mario Gibney will discuss the various actions that people can take to decrease the risks and increase the odds of human flourishing in the coming years and decades.

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  • AI Policy Tuesdays: Frontier AI Deployments in US National Security and Defence

    ​Tuesday, September 2nd, 6:00pm - 9:00pm

    On July 17, the Pentagon awarded $800 million to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI to develop advanced AI systems, including agentic models. What are the implications for global stability, AI governance, and AI safety?

    ​Jason Yung traces the arc of AI’s integration into U.S. defense policy and explores what might lie ahead under Trump 2.0.

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Past Events

  • AI Safety Thursdays: Avoiding Gradual Disempowerment

    ​Thursday, July 3rd, 6pm-8pm

    This talk explored the concept of gradual disempowerment as an alternative to the abrupt takeover scenarios often discussed in AI safety. Dr David Duvenaud examined how even incremental improvements in AI capabilities can erode human influence over critical societal systems, including the economy, culture, and governance.

  • AI Policy Tuesdays: Agent Governance

    Tuesday, June 24th.

    Kathrin Gardhouse presented on the nascent field of Agent Governance, drawing from a recent report by IAPS.

    ​The presentation covered current agent capabilities, expected developments, governance challenges, and proposed solutions.

  • Hackathon: Apart x Martian Mechanistic Router Interpretability Hackathon

    Friday, May 30 - Sunday, Jun 1.

    We hosted a jamsite for Apart Research and Martian's hackathon.

  • AI Safety Thursdays: Advanced AI's Impact on Power and Society

    ​Thursday, May 29th, 6pm-8pm

    Historically, significant technological shifts often coincide with political instability, and sometimes violent transfers of power. Should we expect AI to follow this pattern, or are there reasons to hope for a smooth transition to the post AI world?

    ​Anson Ho drew upon economic models, broad historical trends, and recent developments in deep learning to guide us through an exploration of this question.

  • AI + Human Flourishing: Policy Levers for AI Governance

    Sunday, May 4, 2025.

    Considerations of AI governance are increasingly urgent as powerful models become more capable and widely deployed. Kathrin Gardhouse delivered a presentation on the available mechanisms we can use to govern AI, from policy levers to technical AI governance. It was a high-level introduction to the world of AI policy to get a sense of the lay of the land.

  • AI Safety Thursday: "AI-2027"

    Thursday April 24th, 2025.

    On April 3rd, a team of AI experts and superforecasters at The AI Futures Project, published a narrative called AI-2027 outlining a possible scenario of explosive AI development and takeover occurring during the coming 2 years.

    Mario Gibney guided us through a presentation and discussion of the scenario where we explore how likely it is to actually track reality in the coming years.

See Our Past Events Here