Introduction

This is a short summary of my experience attending the ML4Good UK bootcamp in September 2024. There are 2 previous experience reports I link to at the bottom, but because the program is refined each time, I wanted to describe my experience and add my two cents. This is useful for you if you are contemplating applying for the camp, or if you want to learn about AI Safety field building efforts. For context, I studied computer science, have been working as a software engineer for a few years and have had a hobby interest in AI safety for about 2 years (e.g., I did the BlueDot impact AI safety fundamentals course).

Overview of the program

The bootcamp is free (including room and board) , and happens over 10 days at CEEALAR in the UK. We had participants from all over Europe from multiple backgrounds, with most people about to finish or just having finished their degrees. Majors skewed towards computer science/maths-y degrees, but there were plenty of exceptions and any background is welcome. Compared to previous iterations, the program density was somewhat reduced. Our courses ran from 9am-7:30pm, and usually looked something like this:

Time	Activity
9:00-11:00	Lectures, usually 1 technical + 1 conceptual
11:00-11:30	Break
11:30-13:00	Work on Jupyter Notebooks in pairs or alone, applying the lecture content
12:00-14:00	Lunch+Break
14:00-15:00	Lecture, technical or conceptual
15:00-16:30	Workshop applying the lecture contents, doing our own reading/research
16:30-17:00	Break
17:00-19:30	Discussion about certain AI safety topics, Q&A with TAs, events, feedback on the day
19:30-20:30	Dinner

Although attendance for each session was voluntary, nearly everyone chose to participate in all camp sessions. We covered a wide range of topics. On the technical side: Gradient descent/SGD, Transformers, adversarial Attacks, RL basics, RLHF, Evals and Mechanistic Interpretability. On the conceptual side we looked at: Timelines and what they mean, threat models, risks from AI systems, proposed solutions for alignment and AI governance. There was also a longer literature review session of our choice, and the last 1.5 days were focused on a project we chose. My impression was that the idea of the bootcamp is to expose you to a wide range of subfields in AI safety, so that you continue researching or working on the fields that you find interesting, rather th...