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Articles by Ryan Kidd
MATS Autumn 2026 Fellowship - Apply by June 7th
TL;DR: MATS Autumn 2026 applications are now open. It's a 10-week fully-funded research fellowship (Sep 28th to Dec 4th, 2026) in AI alignment, security, and governance, with mentorship from researchers at Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Redwood, AI Futures Project, and more. This cohort also launches two new tracks: a Founding & Field-Building track and a Biosecurity track. Fellows receive a $5,000/month stipend + $8,000/month compute budget, plus housing, meals, and travel.
AI safety undervalues founders — LessWrong
Aren't the central example of founders in AI Safety the people who founded Anthropic, OpenAI and arguably Deepmind? Right after that Mechanize comes to mind. I am not fully sure what you mean by founders, but it seems to me that the best organizations were founded by people who also wrote a lot, and generally developed a good model of the problems in parallel to running an organization. Even this isn't a great predictor. I don't really know what is.
Trends in Economic Inputs to AI — LessWrong
Frontier AI companies have seen rapid increases in the economic resources they have available to pursue AI progress. At some companies, the number of employees is at least doubling every year, and the amount of capital received is tripling every year. It is unclear whether this growth is sustainable. Is the revenue growing faster than the capital requirements? If it is, will revenue catch up before the capital available for AI investments runs out?
Apply to MATS 9.0! — LessWrong
MATS 9.0 applications are open! Launch your career in AI alignment, governance, and security with our 12-week research program. MATS provides field-leading research mentorship, funding, Berkeley & London offices, housing, and talks/workshops with AI experts. MATS has accelerated 450+ researchers in the past 3.5 years.
MATS is hiring! - LessWrong
TL;DR: The MATS team is growing and has several new roles, from leadership to entry-level positions. Review the full extent of job descriptions and apply by Apr 25! The ML Alignment & Theory Scholars (MATS) program aims to find and train talented individuals for what we see as the world’s most urgent and talent-constrained problem: reducing risks from unaligned artificial intelligence.
MATS Spring 2024 Extension Retrospective
This retrospective focuses on the 4-month MATS extension phase (referred to as "MATS 5.1") that ran from April 1 to July 25, 2024, and presents findings gathered from an end-of-extension survey as well as follow-up interviews and surveys ~5 months after the program.
MATS Spring 2024 Extension Retrospective — LessWrong
This retrospective focuses on the 4-month MATS extension phase (referred to as "MATS 5.1") that ran from April 1 to July 25, 2024, and presents findings gathered from an end-of-extension survey as well as follow-up interviews and surveys ~5 months after the program.
[Job ad] LISA CEO — LessWrong
Job Title: Chief Executive Officer Company Name: London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA) Location: Old Street, London Duration: Full-time Salary Range: £95-125k (more may be available for an exceptional candidate) Application Deadline: Monday 24th February We are looking for a Chief Executive Officer with experience as a senior manager, start-up founder, or executive to lead LISA's high-performing, agile team in London.
Implications of the inference scaling paradigm for AI safety — LessWrong
With the release of OpenAI's o1 and o3 models, it seems likely that we are now contending with a new scaling paradigm: spending more compute on model inference at run-time reliably improves model performance. As shown below, o1's AIME accuracy increases at a constant rate with the logarithm of test-time compute (OpenAI, 2024).
MATS mentor selection — LessWrong
MATS currently has more people interested in being mentors than we are able to support—for example, for the Winter 2024-25 Program, we received applications from 87 prospective mentors who cumulatively asked for 223 scholars (for a cohort where we expected to only accept 80 scholars). As a result, we need some process for how to choose which researchers to take on as mentors and how many scholars to allocate each.
[Job Ad] MATS is hiring! — LessWrong
If you are interested in supporting the development of research projects and researchers in AI safety, the MATS team is currently hiring for Community Manager, Research Manager, and Operations Generalist roles and would love to hear from you. Please apply by Nov 3 to join our team for the Winter 2024-25 Program over the period of Dec 9-Apr 11. Most open roles have the possibility of long-term extension depending on performance and program needs.
MATS AI Safety Strategy Curriculum v2 — LessWrong
As part of our Summer 2024 Program, MATS ran a series of discussion groups focused on questions and topics we believe are relevant to prioritizing research into AI safety. Each weekly session focused on one overarching question, and was accompanied by readings and suggested discussion questions.
MATS Alumni Impact Analysis — LessWrong
This winter, MATS will be running our seventh program. In early-mid 2024, 46% of alumni from our first four programs (Winter 2021-22 to Summer 2023) completed a survey about their career progress since participating in MATS. This report presents key findings from the responses of these 72 alumni.
Apply to MATS 7.0! — LessWrong
Applications are open for the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars (MATS) Winter 2024-25 Program, running Jan 6-Mar 14, 2025. First-stage applications are due Oct 6! MATS is a twice-yearly, 10-week AI safety research fellowship program operating in Berkeley, California, with an optional 4-month extension program. Scholars are supported with a research stipend, shared office space, seminar program, support staff, accommodation, travel reimbursement, and computing resources.
Index of rationalist groups in the Bay Area July 2024 — LessWrong
[Last update: 2024-08-09] The Bay Area rationalist community has an entry problem! Lots of listed groups are dead, the last centralized index disappeared, communication moved to private discord and slacks. This is bad, so we're making a new index, hopefully up to date and as complete as we can! Discord: Bay Area Rationalists: https://discord.gg/EpG4xUVKtf Email Group: BayAreaLessWrong: https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong Taco Tuesday: by Austin Chen, founder emeritus of Manifold.
Talk: AI safety fieldbuilding at MATS — LessWrong
I recently gave a talk to the AI Alignment Network (ALIGN) in Japan on my priorities for AI safety fieldbuilding based on my experiences at MATS and LISA (slides, recording). A lightly edited talk transcript is below. I recommend this talk to anyone curious about the high level strategy that motivates projects like MATS. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to delve into rebuttals and counter-rebuttals to our theory of change; this will have to wait for another talk/post.
Talent Needs of Technical AI Safety Teams — LessWrong
Co-Authors: @yams, @Carson Jones, @McKennaFitzgerald, @Ryan Kidd MATS tracks the evolving landscape of AI safety to ensure that our program continues to meet the talent needs of safety teams. As the field has grown, it’s become increasingly necessary to adopt a more formal approach to this monitoring, since relying on a few individuals to intuitively understand the dynamics of such a vast ecosystem could lead to significant missteps.
Talent Needs in Technical AI Safety — LessWrong
Co-Authors: William Brewer @Carson Jones, @McKennaFitzgerald, @Ryan Kidd MATS tracks the evolving landscape of AI safety to ensure that our program continues to meet the talent needs of safety orgs. As the field has grown, it’s become increasingly necessary to adopt a more formal approach to this monitoring, since relying on a few individuals to intuitively understand the dynamics of such a vast ecosystem could lead to significant missteps.
MATS Winter 2023-24 Retrospective — LessWrong
Co-Authors: @Rocket, @Ryan Kidd, @LauraVaughan, @McKennaFitzgerald, @Christian Smith, @Juan Gil, @Henry Sleight The ML Alignment & Theory Scholars program (MATS) is an education and research mentorship program for researchers entering the field of AI safety. This winter, we held the fifth iteration of the MATS program, in which 63 scholars received mentorship from 20 research mentors.
Extending the diabetic retinopathy screening intervals in Singapore: methodology and preliminary findings of a cohort study - BMC Public Health
The study is being implemented at four of the nine SingHealth Polyclinic (SHP) locations (Supplementary materials), namely Bedok and Pasir Ris (East of Singapore), and Outram and Bukit Merah (South). Recruitment commenced in December 2017, March 2018, October 2018 and January 2019 at Bedok, Outram, Pasir Ris and Bukit Merah, respectively, and ended at all sites in May 2021. The 12-, 24-, and 36-month follow-up data collection is currently ongoing.
MATS AI Safety Strategy Curriculum — LessWrong
As part of the MATS Winter 2023-24 Program, scholars were invited to take part in a series of weekly discussion groups on AI safety strategy. Each strategy discussion focused on a specific crux we deemed relevant to prioritizing AI safety interventions and was accompanied by a reading list and suggested discussion questions. The discussion groups were faciliated by several MATS alumni and other AI safety community members and generally ran for 1-1.5 h.
Apply for MATS Winter 2023-24! — LessWrong
Applications are now open for the Winter 2023-24 cohort of MATS (previously SERI MATS).
Estimating the Current and Future Number of AI Safety Researchers — LessWrong
Interesting analysis. Some questions and notes: How are you looking at "researchers" vs. "engineers"? At some organizations, i.e. Redwood, the boundary is very fuzzy - there isn't a sharp delineation between anyone whose job it is to primarily "think of ideas", vs. "implement ideas that researchers come up with", so it seems reasonable to count most of their technical staff as researchers. FAR, on the other hand, does have separate job titles for "Research Scientist" (4 people) vs.
Losing the root for the tree — LessWrong
1 You know that being healthy is important. And that there's a lot of stuff you could do to improve your health: getting enough sleep, eating well, reducing stress, and exercising, to name a few. There’s various things to hit on when it comes to exercising too. Strength, obviously. But explosiveness is a separate thing that you have to train for. Same with flexibility. And don’t forget cardio! Strength is most important though, because of course it is.
Necklace for my girlfriend & Best... for Summer Morris
Necklace for my girlfriend & Best friend
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