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AI safety fieldbuilding in Warsaw, Poland (funding for 1 semester)

Technical AI safetyGlobal catastrophic risks
Piotr avatar

Piotr Zaborszczyk

ActiveGrant
$10,024raised
$10,024funding goal
Fully funded and not currently accepting donations.

Project summary

Some of the most talented AI people in the world are Poles. 10 out of 50 early OpenAI employees were Polish (source: https://therecursive.com/openai-in-poland-fireside-chat-with-wojciech-zaremba-sam-altman-and-szymon-sidor/ ). Most of them come from just one elite university: University of Warsaw. Remarkably, not only isn't there any AI safety org trying to reach its students. There isn't a single AI safety org in the whole Poland.

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

Reaching out to Poland's best technical students and convincing them that AI safety is a thing seems like a neglected, impactful and tractable cause area. Furthermore, it seems that progress could be made quite inexpensively.

Concretely: the project would provide the first exposure to AI safety for skilled technical students. Ideally, we would help the students gain enough knowledge and expertise to be a good fit for programs ranging in difficulty from ML4Good to MATS.

To be clear, by AI safety I mean decreasing x-risks and s-risks posed by a future unaligned artificial superintelligence. There are many paths toward that noble goal. I plan to focus my fieldbuilding efforts mainly on the technical route, and to a lesser extent on outreach and policy. I currently regard a complete moratorium / ban on frontier AI model development as completely unrealistic, so I will not advocate for it.

The funding will be for 1 semester of fieldbuilding.

How will this funding be used?

  • Organizing events: presentations, hackathons, networking, 1 on 1 mentoring, group projects

  • Creating a university group with regular meetings

  • Advertising costs, both offline and online

  • Travel & accommodation costs for presenters from outside Warsaw to come and present on campus

  • Optionally: some swag (stickers etc.), pizza & soft drinks for events to help win goodwill of the students

  • Significant room for scaling up the project with more time and funding: reaching students from relevant but less strictly technical programs (e.g. cognitive neuroscience), reaching other good universities in the area, "preaching" AI safety at tech meetups, running the project for longer.

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

Most probable collaborators:

  • Poles I met at ML4Good: Mikołaj Kniejski, Jakub Nowak, Michał Skowronek

  • Active members of EA Poland who are based in Warsaw (~15 people)

  • Active members of Polish online AI Safety reading group

Most probable consultants for the project:

  • Charbel-Raphael Segerie (CeSIA), Nia Gardner (ML4Good organiser), Carolina Oliveira (operations, Condor Camp)

  • Experienced EA university group leaders and fieldbuilders such as Chris Szulc (leader of EA Poland)

  • Polish AI safety "rockstars" involved with EA, such as Tomek Korbak (currently at Anthropic)

Track record (project leader - Piotr): attended University of Warsaw's CS program myself + my high school classmate is currently teaching there as a PhD. Created a profitable 2-person company at age 20. Recruited 300 people in 2 months for a non-profit project via unpaid Facebook marketing in early 2020. Worked 5+ years as a software dev, briefly as a junior ML dev, attended ML4Good, been familiar with the EA movement & AI alignment ideas since 2014.

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

There is really no possibility for a complete failure. In the worst case I think we would manage to convince much fewer people than we initially hoped. But we plan to reach everyone we can, one way or the other (one could DM every student on Messenger or email if all else fails).

The most likely obstacles I can foresee would be someone from the faculty actively trying to prevent us from reaching the students. In that case, we would try to speak to the students directly, e.g. online. We would also try our luck with other programs and other universities in the city.

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

Zero. It would be my first grant. I provide my own salary, so one could say I have raised that. I'm able to pay myself because of my past investments (I had invested in real estate with the money earned as a programmer).

My income is only ~650$ net a month (which has purchasing power comparable to ~1300$ in the US), so I am unable to fund more than just my salary.

I like libertarian / randian aesthetics, am quite frugal and will not waste your money.

Comments6Donations3Similar6
Piotr avatar

Piotr Zaborszczyk

2 days ago

Progress update

What progress have you made since your last update?

I tried recruiting people offline in Warsaw, which worked much much worse than expected. E.g. after 15 hours of in-person meetups in AI spaces, I found literally 0 people interested in joining an AI x-risk group. Even designing and printing informative leaflets didn't help.

I've helped organise a panel discussion about AI safety at the University of Warsaw, in October 2025. Jan Betley, Anna Sztyber-Betley, Michał Kubiak and Jakub Growiec were the panelists selected by me. I also bought food, drinks and advertising posters from my grant money. The event amassed 30 attendees, only one of which ended up an active member of my online communities.

After burning more than half the cash on mostly unsuccessful attempts in Warsaw (I had to rent a small studio to live there, as I'm originally from somewhere else), in late June 2025 I decided to move my field building efforts online. I had much better success there.

After cold-messaging 20k+ people on AI-themed and student-themed Facebook groups, I recruited 160 people that expressed an interest in AI safety, to my Messenger group. Recruiting took 200+ hours. I maintained the discussions about AI, AI safety and AI-related x-risks for 5 months (early July - early December 2025). Maintaining the activity in the group took another 200+ hours.

Realising that Messenger is not really the best place to host the group + that the vast majority of my Messenger community is lazy and interested in mostly lurking or at most exchanging a few messages, starting December 2025 I created a new space - on Discord. As of today, it's a 80-person server that mainly hosts discussions about non-technical AI safety in Polish. I'm maintaining it actively and I intend to recruit more people to it, maybe with the final goal of ~370 people (recruiting can be tiresome & can take up a big amount of time).

Meanwhile, I'm now mostly dedicated to research for my planned book "AI, Superbabies, Paradise Engineering: What We Should Do With Our Future" which will aim at explaining the core ideas of three main thinkers/activists: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Tsvi Benson-Tilsen and David Pearce to both professional and lay public.

I've also personally recruited about 50 people into AI Safety Poland's slack. It's the official EA-led and EA-blessed Polish AI safety community, too afraid to discuss x-risks for my taste. They focus mainly on things like explainable AI and avoid talking about x-risk, which I dislike and disagree with. Nevertheless, we're allies, so I help them.

I want to stress that all this wasn't done only on the money from the grant. AFAIK Warsaw is only 2x cheaper than San Francisco and this work wouldn't be possible without my mostly-passive income from renting studio apartments. Nevertheless, the grant enabled me to try bolder approaches, dedicate myself more & buy the tools I needed (e.g. a tablet on which I could work during my vacation, some AI subscriptions, a few months' stay in Warsaw etc.) For that I am grateful. I think that without the grant, the community building work - if it would happen at all - would be severely limited in scope. I estimate that without the grant, I would have done less than half of what I did for community building.

What are your next steps?

Most of the cash is gone now and I believe that I've now discharged my duties towards donors, as I've worked 500+ or possibly 600+ hours inside field building, not counting time spent learning AI safety in order to be a better teacher, leader and mentor to my communities. I do plan to maintain and grow my AI safety Discord channel & I plan to continue helping out the EA org AI Safety Poland. Myself, I'm mostly going to focus on writing a book about AI safety. I'm also interested in working with organisations like CeSIA and Evitable in the future.

Is there anything others could help you with?

When my book is ready (if it does end up being written), I'll need plenty of help to publish & market it well.

donated $5,124
NeelNanda avatar

Neel Nanda

about 1 year ago

I just gave Piotr a small top-up for the purposes of running 2 hackathons (or events in the same spirit) in areas of AI Safety, eg making a satellite event for an Apart Hackathon.

I don't know Piotr much, and so can't be confident he'll execute well on this, but this seems pretty positive EV to me. This is very cheap, and I've met a surprising amount of University of Warsaw graduates in elite STEM circles (eg maths olympiads, Cambridge university, Jane Street, etc), so getting any of them excited about AI safety seems great to me. I think hackathons are a great way to energise and ground a group into actually doing practical things, rather than just reading or philosophising, and to help build momentum.

donated $5,124
NeelNanda avatar

Neel Nanda

about 1 year ago

I like the proposal! Do you think you could productively use any more money?

Piotr avatar

Piotr Zaborszczyk

about 1 year ago

@NeelNanda Yes, I think so! ~$5k is good enough for the first semester, but I think I could productively use up to $25k total over the space of 3 semesters. Also, if I had $25k for 3 semesters, I could probably hire some paid part-time help, to help with faster growth (reaching many universities simultaneously etc.)

Obviously, anything between what I have now and $25k total is fine too.

Austin avatar

Austin Chen

about 1 year ago

Approving this grant as part of our portfolio for AI safety education & outreach. The University of Warsaw had not previously been on my radar as a source of such talent, so I'm glad that Piotr is aiming to establish a presence there (and that Jay is excited to fund this!)

donated $4,900
JJ avatar

Jay Schreiber

about 1 year ago

I like the project idea and think this could be great value for money if it goes well.
I had a quick call with Piotr and was convinced he's going to seriously try to make this work.