Awesome! I heard a rumor that David Krueger (one of Bengio's grad students) is one of the main people pushing the safety initiative there, can anyone confirm?
Yes. He runs AI safety meetups at MILA, and played a significant role in getting Yoshua Bengio more interested in safety.
I know that David Krueger is one of the people working with 80000 hours on helping people to get into the AI safety field. He also organized a related google group.
The really good news is that Yoshua Bengio is leading this (he is extremely credible in modern AI/deep learning world), and this is a pretty large change of mind for him. When I spoke to him at a conference 3 years ago he was pretty dismissive of the whole issue; this year's FLI conference seems to have changed his mind (kudos to them)
Of course huge props to OpenPhil for pursuing this