In the past six weeks, the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative (SERI) has been running a work trial for the “ML Alignment Theory Scholars” (MATS) program. Our goal is to increase the number of people working on alignment theory, and to do this, we’re running a scholars program that provides mentorship, funding, and community to promising new alignment theorists. This program is run in partnership with Evan Hubinger, who has been providing all of the mentorship to each of the scholars for their work trial.
As the final phase of the work trial, each participant has taken a previous research artifact (usually an Alignment Forum post) and written a distillation and expansion of that post. The posts were picked by Evan and each participant signed up for one they were interested in. Within the next two weeks (12/7 - 12/17), we’ll be posting all of these posts to lesswrong and the alignment forum as part of a sequence, with a couple of posts going up each day. (There will be around 10-15 posts total.)