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More generally I love the vision here. It's the anti-academia: just try to understand the whole problem at once and don't goodhart on legible output. Wish there were more events/workshops/fellowships/etc. structured like this!
1More generally I love the vision here. It's the anti-academia: just try to understand the whole problem at once and don't goodhart on legible output. Wish there were more events/workshops/fellowships/etc. structured like this!
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Applications for the Winter 2027 AFFINE Alignment Seminar are now open!
The Seminar will take place in southern Portugal over the course of January. If you are excited to grapple with the philosophical foundations of our field and to refine your thinking through carefully designed workshops, conversations with leading experts, and peer-driven learning, apply now!
Key info:
Vision
We want you to look at the whole of the elephant. Not individual disconnected methods, not theoretical frameworks as they apply solely to machine learning. We think that catastrophic trouble can lie in the gaps between those building blocks and that the field desperately requires more people with a deep, holistic, generator-level model of what AI-Risk and Alignment are all about. Modern Agent Foundations research will play a large role here, though it isn’t the whole of the story.
“How do we ensure that generally intelligent systems, now and in the future, are beneficial to the moral ambitions of humanity?” It’s not a computer science question, even if computer science will be necessary for the implementation details. The answers needed before one gets to coding are about the nature of intelligence, about the attributes of complex systems which constitute morality, and about what it means to empower a species that disagrees with itself. These are problems regarding life, mind, value, and all those things philosophy has sought to grasp long before machine learning emerged onto the scene. The stage has not been fully built, and we do not have a language in which the script might be written, and yet, instead of working on these foundations, most effort is spent fine-tuning methods only broadly related to the central query from monitoring to control.
We want to work on ASI alignment and deep safety, not on getting the next model ready for deployment. We want to turn this field from a grab bag of disparate tools and theories into a comprehensive science by building the sort of paradigm that lets one discern relevant questions from intricate noise. This is difficult, so we’ll let you focus on learning and thinking rather than ask for legible research artifacts.
Method
There are quite a few things we do differently, compared to other AI safety programs:
As mentioned above, our participants don’t have predetermined projects. We’re trying to produce more general, rigorous, versatile minds which we trust to do good work in the long run, not to publish a research paper on any given topic. The type of thinking we want to encourage is difficult to perform under expectations of short-term legible deliverables.
You won’t have a single assigned mentor either. A part of getting those highly general models will be to load up the problem from a number of different angles. All of our leading experts are at your disposal in workshops, 1-on-1s, office hours, and in the halls.
Our peer tutoring framework allows you to share what you have already learned with the cohort and refactor your model in the process. In turn, they will be more than willing to teach you. Exchanging expertise in this way strengthens the group, increases bandwidth, and reserves mentor time for the cutting-edge questions rather than basic upskilling.
There will be workshops, lectures, debates, long sessions of drawing arrows on whiteboards, and explicit recovery time to make sure no one burns out. In the beautiful Portuguese countryside, you will be able to focus, to breathe, and to let your mind roam.
Structure
Aside from rare exceptions and weekend excursions, participants will spend four weeks living and working at our venue. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday will have some planned activities in between a lot of open dialogue time, while Wednesdays are structured in an unconference format. Weekends are for whatever you want to do with them.
The core event will run from Monday 4th to Friday 29th of January, and participants will arrive on the days before and leave on the days after.
Meals, accounting for the dietary restrictions of everyone present, will be provided by the venue.
Join us
If you are interested, please apply by the 22nd of November. There will be two more stages in the application process: a few essay-style questions and an interview.
You don’t need a PhD or a prestigious reference so long as you can hold your own when it comes to mathematical formalism and are ravenously philosophically curious. Experience in biology, writing, cryptography, philosophy, linguistics, economics, anthropology, and more will all come in useful.
Think you know someone who would be a good fit? Tell us about them per mail and encourage them to apply.
If you have any questions, please let us know, and we’ll do our best to answer them promptly.
See you at AFFINE!