Abstract

Technical AI Safety 2024 (TAIS 2024) was a conference organised by AI Safety 東京 and Noeon Research, in collaboration with Reaktor Japan, AI Alignment Network and AI Industry Foundation. You may have heard of us through ACX.

The goals of the conference were

demonstrate the practice of technical safety research to Japanese researchers new to the field
share ideas among established technical safety researchers
establish a good international reputation for AI Safety 東京 and Noeon Research
establish a Schelling conference for people working in technical safety

We sent out a survey after the conference to get feedback from attendees on whether or not we achieved those goals. We certainly achieved goals 1, 2 and 3; goal 4 remains to be seen. In this post we give more details about the conference, share results from the feedback survey, and announce our intentions to run another conference next year.

Okay but like, what was TAIS 2024?

Technical AI Safety 2024 (TAIS 2024) was a small non-archival open academic conference structured as a lecture series. It ran over the course of 2 days from April 5th–6th 2024 at the International Conference Hall of the Plaza Heisei in Odaiba, Tokyo.

We had 18 talks covering 6 research agendas in technical AI safety:

Mechanistic Interpretability
- Developmental Interpretability
Scaleable Oversight
Agent Foundations
- Causal Incentives
- ALIFE

…including talks from Hoagy Cunningham (Anthropic), Noah Y. Siegel (DeepMind), Manuel Baltieri (Araya), Dan Hendrycks (CAIS), Scott Emmons (CHAI), Ryan Kidd (MATS), James Fox (LISA), and Jesse Hoogland and Stan van Wingerden (Timaeus).

In addition to our invited talks, we had 25 submissions, of which 19 were deemed relevant for presentation. 5 were offered talk slots, and we arranged a poster session to accommodate the remaining 14. In the end, 7 people presented posters, 5 in person and 2 in absentia. Our best poster award was won jointly by Fazl Berez for Large Language Models Relearn Removed Concepts and Alex Spies for Structured Representations in Maze-Solving Transformers.

We had 105 in-person attendees (including the speakers). Our live streams had around 400 unique viewers, and maxed out at 18 concurrent viewers.

Recordings of the conference talks are hosted on our youtube channel.

How did it go?

Very well, thanks for asking!

We sent out a feedback survey a...

Filip Berndtsson

Filip Berndtsson