Project summary

The world is racing towards standalone AGI as a goal in and of itself. With this approach, we risk losing the opportunity to seriously empower and prepare people for this technology before it poses serious threats to our safety or leaves us behind economically. Largely inspired by the Intelligence Curse and d/acc, we think the antidote is to build technologies that augment human capabilities, defend us from existential threats (bio, cyber, psychological), and quickly distribute the benefits of frontier AI progress to the masses. We’re gathering some of the brightest minds in one place to develop concrete agendas and prototype solutions.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

We want to gather bright minds from multiple disciplines to think, from first principles, about the technical and policy agendas we should pursue to defend against existential threats and keep humans in the loop through the AGI transition. We believe that many of the smartest people in various fields can and should work on AI safety, and that we need workshops and hackathons like this to expose them to the impact they could have. Some example projects people may work on include rigorous threat model demos, misinformation catchers, digital identity protection tools, educational tools, or AI governance mechanisms.

Finally, we'd like to publish a document at the end of the workshop outlining any novel proposals or solutions that were developed.

How will this funding be used?

We’d like to use ~$4000 to pay for Edge Esmeralda tickets and 1-night accommodation for our panelists (1st priority), $9000 as hackathon prize money (2nd priority), and $2000 for hackathon food/other resources (3rd priority).

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

Dhruv Sumathi studied EE at Stanford and was a founding engineer at Cradle, a company building reversible cryopreservation technology. He left to focus on making the transition to AGI go well and is currently exploring how neurotechnology might help with this.

Shon Pan holds a marketing degree from Texas A&M. He was recognized as an API security engineer at Broadcom  and has since moved into project manager for infrastructure IT projects at 7-11, Toyota, and Bank of America since 2015. As a father of two, he is now focused on developing tools that keep humanity relevant as AGI enters the world. He has built two groups focused on building tools and policy solutions for this.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

The most likely causes of failure are low attendance and unclear goal-setting. In practice, this would manifest as not having any useful projects or novel ideas developed.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

None