This past weekend, I was at The Curve, “a conference where thinkers, builders, and leaders grapple with AI’s biggest questions.” Or in other words, a place where people with power to influence government policy, people working in AI labs, and people working on AI safety could come together to share ideas and, more importantly, get to know each other personally over a weekend at Lighthaven in Berkeley.

Just to give you an idea of the kind of people who were there, the public attendee list included:

• Yoshua Bengio

• Dean Ball

• Brad Carson

• Ronnie Chatterji

• Ted Chiang

• Joseph Gordon-Levitt

• Allan Dafoe

• Daniel Kokotajlo

• Tim O’Reilly

• Helen Toner

• Audrey Tang

And of course many more. Which raises the obvious question: why the heck was I there?

I got an email a couple months ago asking me to help out with conference operations. In exchange for making sure things ran smoothly, I got to be an attendee when not busy working. That means that during the day I was mostly occupied with making sure talks in one of the rooms went smoothly, and then at night I got to hang out with everyone.

Among everyone was Zvi. He’s already posted a fairly comprehensive summary of his experiences at the conference, and if you’re interested I recommend reading it. I had a different experience of the conference than him, though, so I think it’s worth sharing a few impressions:

• Talks were generally good and either focused on telling policy folks about AI capabilities and risks or on helping the technical crowd understand how frustratingly complicated policy is.

• Lots of socializing happened, including a lot of networking. I walked away with lots of new contacts in my phone from people I never would have otherwise met.

• The socializing was all generally positive. Event attendance was carefully curated, so attendees felt comfortable letting their guard down. This allowed connections to happen between people who wouldn’t otherwise meet because they’re in opposing camps.

  • My guess is this was the most impactful aspect of the conference!

• On a personal note, I discovered there’s a huge difference in how people respond to the words “I wrote a book” vs. “I’m writing a book” and the former is better!

  • Lest you think I was lying, both these statements are true. I have written a book in that I have a complete version of my book online, but I’m also working on revisions for publication, so in a sense I’m still writing it. This ambiguous state gave me the chance to A/B test different words and see how people responded.

• Finally, I was surprised just how much more aware policy folks are than I expected. I was misled into thinking they were out of touch because policy proposals lag behind current trends for a variety of reasons. Although some policy folks definitely had “oh shit” moments at the conference, on the whole they were much better informed than I expected them to be.

Overall, I think the conference was good, I hope it happens again next year, and I especially hope I can find my way back to it in 2026!

Special thanks to everyone who organized the conference and worked it with me. Attendees consistently sang the praises of the conference while it was going on, including one person who told me it was the best conference they’d been to since COVID.