Project description

Eek! will be the world's first digital platform for dolphins. Thinking of AI safety only in human-aligned terms carries a risk of Goodharting (if we try too hard to align AI to human interests, human-aligned AI ceases to be a good target). We believe that optimizing an engaging information feed for another intelligent species could be a practical route toward a more general understanding of cognition, as well as inspire more robust guardrails against addictive AI-generated content.

What is your track record on similar projects?

We developed Machine Thoughts, one of the world's first GPT-based Twitter bots. This project aimed to expose the dangers of generative content in online discourse. Machine Thoughts was finetuned on a corpus of debate responses to contradict any tweet it was asked to reply to. The resulting tweets were equal parts amusing and discomfiting, and reached a surprising level of engagement.

In addition, one team member leads machine learning development for a company that has raised over $6 million in pre-seed funding, while the other is pursuing a Ph.D. Both have M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Columbia University.

How will you spend your funding?

Underwater microphone, underwater speakers, LED light array, aquarium fees. Software development and computing costs will be covered by the team.