Some updates after 30 days of launching the project without any funds:
- we have more than 40 researchers, including a few high school students interested in ai governance and alignment
- 5 research projects with an average count of 3 -10 researchers per project (researchers are mostly from META, MIT, Harvard, Open AI and Cornell).
- we have been timely since African nation states are getting keen about AI reception in Africa
- collaboration with GovAI, BlueDot on the fellowship
- organising a zero-cost online fellowship
- we are submitting our first paper on Factored Cognition of LLMs using causal influence diagrams,
- we have world-class PhD mentors leading projects at Equiano Institute
I would like to tag people who have regranted us before Manifund: @LeopoldAschenbrenner @LinchuanZhang
And people we have engaged with in the past few weeks @RenanAraujo
Thank you, would appreciate any thoughts.
@Austin
@Jonas
AI progress and alignment studies
jonas$0 in pending offers
I am Jonas, the founder of the African AI Safety Lab, Equiano Institute, and Progress Studies Journal. I am passionate about promoting AI alignment and policy for African. I pursued my studies in Computer Science, earning a candidate for Masters at the University of Sussex and completing a BSc in Mathematics at Istanbul University. As an independent researcher, I established the Progress Studies Journal, which serves as an overlay journal dedicated to distilling research aimed at technological progress, and responsible innovation. Previously, I served as Founder in Residence at Enterpreneur UK in London, where I worked with a select group of entrepreneurs to build projects and foster partnerships. I am also actively involved with Cohere For AI as a volunteer, leading AI Safety Talks. In this role, under Sara Hooker.
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Jonas Kgomo
3 months ago
Jonas Kgomo
3 months ago
pinging to share with you on this final day pre-archival
@joel_bkr @GavrielK @IsaakFreeman @AntonMakiievskyi
Jonas Kgomo
3 months ago
I can say this organisation is likely to have impact as we are also considering working with them on a fellowship
Jonas Kgomo
5 months ago
Agreed, we have seen different failure modes and talent agglomeration that are unique to Africa and that might be absent in other AGI hubs. The training and capacity building is a special and main part of the project, we want to launch a broader talent search program. So far we have been doing targeted outreach and community building, which is less intensive than launching a lab. We are using the approach of grassroots research lab, which has proven to be effective in Africa for projects like Masakhane NLP, Cohere For AI, Deep Learning Indaba [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSCQ2Tv3YmA]
We have seen limits to global inclusion in AI development [https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.01265] , hence opinions represented by the models are less similar to participants in Africa [https://llmglobalvalues.anthropic.com] . We aim to have an interdisciplinary community capable of advising on AI governance and work on technical AI alignment research (especially for reducing disparities, bias and suffering "s-risk" caused by AI)