TL;DR: The Zurich AI Safety Day - a one-day conference in Zurich of more than 200 participants - was a new event format to bring together the AI safety field across Europe and tap into the local talent pool. The feedback received was very positive, and the event could serve as a foundation to learn from for future cause-area specific conferences. This post summarizes the rough numbers, goals, feedback received, and learnings from the event.

"I found out that AI safety is sexy now." - This was among the feedback we received for the Zurich AI Safety Day. But what was the Zurich AI Safety Day all about?

A Conference Dedicated to AI Safety

On Saturday, September 27, we organized the Zurich AI Safety Day. For 10 hours, more than 200 people interested in AI Safety from across Europe met to exchange ideas, find new collaborations, and learn about pathways to a safer development of AGI. The conference hosted 14 talks and workshops and an Org Fair with more than 20 organizations in the field, including UK AISI, Apollo Research, FAR.AI, and Palisade Research. It was organized in collaboration between BlueDot Impact and Zurich AI Safety and supported financially by Open Philanthropy.

There were three main goals for the event:

Get more senior talent and motivated newcomers involved with the field
- Conferences can get a lot more visibility on public platforms than small events or activities of associations. At the same time, Zurich has strong talent pipelines for technical AI safety work in the form of universities like ETH Zurich, and with many big tech companies present, including Google DeepMind. Onboarding these talents into the field and making them aware of the issues was one of the priorities for the event.
- To catch talent that is working in the context of AI, a labelling of the conference as an AI safety conference seemed better than labelling it as an Effective Altruism conference.
Strengthen the Swiss and European AI safety ecosystem by connecting various stakeholders around the topic
- Connecting different actors within a high-impact field with each other has proven successful in inspiring new ideas and collaborations across EAG(x) conferences.
- In contrast to having this exchange on an EAG(x) conference, a dedicated AI safety conference can help create a shared identity for the field and strengthen the connections to non-EA organizations working on related issues in the lo

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