Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
This is a linkpost for https://www.conjecture.dev/japan-ai-alignment-conference
I feel like Japan might be better than e.g. America at coordinating to solve alignment / prevent risky AI advances, due to having a more collectivist culture and greater internal solidarity as a country. But that could be a stereotype. Still, this is exciting news.
I hope that they will stay in contact, and form strong relationships together. It is bad to reinvent the wheel.
It's also important to keep in mind that the language barrier might cause problems for the most valuable minds in Japan, disproportionately favoring top linguistic thinkers over top mathematical thinkers. For example, see this quote by Viliam:
Also, some kids have an aversion against practicing stuff. Often the smart ones -- they sometimes identify as "intelligent", and it is a part of their self-image that they are supposed to learn things by mere understanding; anything that resembles work means for them that they have failed, because they were supposed to learn it without working hard. I knew very smart kids who just couldn't learn a foreign language, because the idea of "memorizing by repetition" horrified them, and... nothing else worked. Their less smart classmates already learned the languages by practicing.
Does more information more frequently spread via word-of-mouth among Japanese AI workers, relative to American and Chinese AI workers? Are AI papers translated into Japanese more consistently instead of just being left as english?
Conjecture and ARAYA are hosting and organizing the first Japan AI Alignment Conference. The conference will take place in Tokyo, Japan on March 11 and 12. Details about the event can be found here. This event is generously supported by a grant from the Long Term Future Fund.
The goal of the conference is to illustrate the AI control problem to Japanese AI researchers, introduce them to current trends in AI alignment research, inspire new research directions, and to provide Western researchers exposure to a different set of AI safety thoughts from Japan. This is an exploratory event, and we plan to write a postmortem about the event in due time.
The first half of the conference will be livestreamed. It will feature an opening talk from Connor Leahy (CEO of Conjecture), a fireside chat between Ryota Kanai (CEO of ARAYA) and Jaan Tallinn, and some presentations on AI safety research directions in the West and in Japan. You can follow the first part of the conference here. The livestream runs from 9:30am-12:30pm JST.
The rest of the conference will not be livestreamed, and will consist of in-person small group workshops to discuss various AI alignment research directions.
The conference will have ~50 attendees from ARAYA, Conjecture, Whole Brain Architecture Initiative, MIRI, OpenAI, RIKEN, Ritsumeikan University, University of Tokyo, Omron Sinic X, Keio University, and others.