What projects is CAIS working on?

The Center for AI Safety

(CAIS)1

Not to be confused with Comprehensive AI Services, a conceptual model of artificial general intelligence proposed by Eric Drexler

Eric Drexler

Engineer known for introducing molecular nanotechnology. More recently, he has been interested in AI and promotes a tool-based view he calls Comprehensive AI Services (CAIS).

, also usually abbreviated CAIS.

is a San Francisco-based research non-profit that "focuses on mitigating high-consequence, societal-scale risks posed by AI". It pursues technical research aimed at improving the safety of existing AI systems, as well as multi-disciplinary conceptual research aimed at framing and clarifying problems and approaches within AI safety.

CAIS also works on field-building to help support and expand the AI safety research community. Its field-building projects include:

• The CAIS Compute

  Compute

  Shorthand for “computing power”. It may refer to, for instance, physical infrastructure such as CPUs or GPUs that perform processing, or the amount of processing power needed to train a model.

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  Cluster, which offers compute for AI safety research

• The CAIS Philosophy Fellowship

• Offering prize incentives for safety-relevant research such as improving ML

  Machine learning

  An approach to AI in which, instead of designing an algorithm directly, we have the system search through possible algorithms based on how well they do on some training data.

  safety benchmarks, moral uncertainty detection by ML systems, and forecasting by ML systems

• Offering an ML Safety course and scholarships for ML students doing safety-related research

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1. Not to be confused with Comprehensive AI Services, a conceptual model of artificial general intelligence proposed by Eric Drexler, also usually abbreviated CAIS. ↩︎