Past Events

Interested in AI Safety, but feel like everyone is ahead of you? Did some reading or just finished a BlueDot course, but don’t feel like you know enough to post publicly? Worried that the field moves faster than you can keep up? Feeling stuck or overwhelmed, or worried by a lack of technical skills?If the traditional field on-ramps don’t serve you right, this one is for you! Join us for a low-pressure, non-technical hackathon to get things done. For Part 2, we'll be hosting an AI Safety Career Fair and Founders Summit on Friday, July 24 for a chance to showcase your work with hiring organizations or learn from other builders & funders.​ Who’s this for? You are a generalist or less-technical individual from another field. You are looking to pivot into AI Safety and trying to be more hands-on and connect with the field, but unsure how to proceed. Maybe you’re already working on something, actively scoping your interests, or just curious. You’re bottlenecked by the lack of community or internal barriers, and you want to engage with fellow AI Safety explorers. If you are an organization that would be excited to support as a judge, provide datasets, or sponsor, please register your interest here: https://tinyurl.com/org-breaking-barriers​ Hosted by BlueDot Impact & Mox

​AI 2040: Plan A is a detailed positive scenario for how humanity might avoid a dangerous race to superintelligence and reach a flourishing future. It proposes buying time, making AI research transparent, distributing frontier capabilities across multiple countries and companies, and preserving reversibility through enforceable compute governance. ​Join Thomas Larsen, co-author of AI 2027 and lead author of AI 2040, for a presentation and discussion of Plan A: why the team frames it as a recommendation rather than a prediction, how the proposal would slow the race to superintelligence until 2040, and where its assumptions, tradeoffs, and implementation challenges deserve scrutiny. ​Read the scenario: https://ai-2040.com/

How can we bring the world's largest food companies to the table to discuss welfare protections for the most neglected species? Chrystine Liptrot, founder of the International Council for Animal Welfare, has been winning cage-free policies from multinational firms for more than a decade. But last year, ICAW won the world's first corporate campaign for shrimp welfare. Come learn about the corporate campaigns that go where none have dared to go before.

​Join us for dinner and a talk with economist Robin Hanson on abstraction: ​"For many decades now, I've hung around a set of adjacent communities, of 'extropians', 'rationalists', etc. They are nerdy folks, interested in tech & the future, with a strong taste for abstraction. Which suggests that we talk more explicitly about how we decide which abstractions we are willing to rely on how much."

Do you have friends at frontier companies wondering how to safely raise concerns? Join us for a Q&A with Karl Koch, who runs AIWI — an independent non-profit strengthening the position of frontier AI insiders in raising concerns.

Journalist Garrison Lovely is previewing his new book Obsolete at Mox before it drops in June. He's been covering AI for The Nation, NYT, Nature, and others — his take is that most of the debate is asking the wrong question. Short talk, Q&A, good conversation after.

Join EA San Francisco for a talk by Andrés Gómez Emilsson (Qualia Research Institute) on new approaches to understanding and reducing suffering!

Eon Systems has digitized a fly: they took a connectome of the fruit fly brain, applied a simple neuron model and used it to control a physics-simulated body, closing the loop from neural activation to action. Michael Andregg, Founder and CEO, is here to explain how they accomplished this, why he thinks it's a genuine upload of a living animal, and what it could mean for future research and how we think about artificial intelligence. Light refreshments will be served before and after the talk. Schedule: 6:30 — Pre-event Members' Dinner (must be a member or guest of a member) 7:00 — Doors for general audience 7:15 — Introduction by Constance Li, executive director of Sentient Futures 7:20 — Talk by Michael Andregg 7:50 — Q+A 9:00 — soft closing, welcome to stay late This event is supported by Eon Systems, Sentient Futures, and Mox. Pay what you want (suggested donation $15)

EA SF is hosting a fun AMA event with some interesting leaders in our community! Theme: Alternative Universe, Staring into the Abyss ⚫, Non-default Questions No questions with answers that you can easily search for online (i.e. what is a prediction market/arbitrage) Vibe: Informal, Fun, Not necessarily EA-coded. Let's walk away seeing fellow community members as approachable & fellow human on floating rock in space. Our Courageous Guests on the Lightning⚡ Round Hot🔥 Seat Austin Chen - founder/associated with Manifund, Mox, Manifest, and OneWord. Dad, Gamer, Builder Constance Li - founder of Sentient Futures, prev Hive. Physician turned AIxAnimals pioneer. Marcus Abramovitch- CEO of Parimutuel Labs (prediction market infrastructure) Prev. in cryptocurrency trading firm. Upstream Policies. Poker. Panama.Roast him on his donations! Potentially a brave you Afterwards, we'll get into group to play some conversations games and ask questions we normally wouldn't. Feel free to bring some you've been meaning to enjoy!

Last week, Dean was arrested and jailed in Wisconsin for participating in a mass rescue of beagle dogs from Ridglan Farms. Ridglan has been a site of public controversy for years due to its confining and experimenting on thousands of dogs. Dean will discuss the rescue effort, his subsequent jail time and possible upcoming felony trial – and why he remains a big advocate for direct action.

Join us for dinner and a talk with David Krueger about his new non-profit Evitable, whose mission is to inform and organize the public to confront societal-scale risks of AI and put an end to the reckless race to develop superintelligence.

Whether you’re serenading your sweetheart, belting out breakup anthems, or simply in love with the sound of your own voice, join us for Live Band Karaoke™ this Valentine’s Day weekend The basic setup: tell us the song you want to sing, we'll look up the chords/lyrics on a big screen and play it, you sing it. And/or sing along in the crowd :) There’s also space in the back to chill out.

Sentient Futures Summit is the meeting place of AI experts, welfare researchers, animal advocates, and passionate thinkers seeking to have an impact. We’ll spend 3 days networking and learning how to steer AI and other technologies for the welfare of animals and potentially sentient artificial minds.

Claude Code can now automate substantial portions of research documentation, generating mini-textbooks, interactive wikis, and structured knowledge bases from your research questions. This workshop teaches you how. Participants will work on creating their own research mini-website during the session, focusing on topics in prioritization research, EA cause areas, or related domains.

At different times soothsayer, naysayer, and doomsayer, Clifford Stoll has lived through every wave of the internet era and all of Silicon Valley's cycles. Now an old mad scientist emeritus, he's here to answer any questions you have about where the hell we are and where the hell we're going. Seems like a good time to me!

​What would it take to build models that actually predict which drugs will work in humans, before we run expensive, years long trials that mostly fail? ​We're missing the datasets needed to capture the complexity of human biology, the tacit knowledge locked in failed experiments, and the clinical signals that disappear between the patient and the database. ​Join Tacit Machines and 1Day Sooner for a fireside chat where Ruxandra Teslo interviews special guests on how to create faster feedback loops in biology: what datasets are missing, why do lab results so often fail to translate to patients, and could unlocking data from failed trials and FDA submissions help us learn faster? ​Guests will include a curated group of biotech founders, ex-FDA, policy leaders, scientific progress writers, and deep tech investors.

"The best documentary ever made", claims Michael.

​Harrison Lin builds high-intensity sunlight generators by hand in San Francisco. He'll walk through the engineering challenges of recreating natural daylight indoors: LED selection, thermal design, heat transfer, and mechanical fabrication.

From the days of Holden Karnofsky's Power Smoothie (https://powersmoothie.org/), Effective Altruism has been obsessed with meal replacements and protein shakes. Have you wanted to try Huel or Soylent powder, but never wanted to spend money on a big bag of it? EA SF, will be hosting a Meal Replacement / Protein Powder potluck! If you can, please bring a protein powder or meal replacement of your choice. The more variety the better! At a bare minimum we'll have: * Huel * Huel Black * Soylent (Chocolate, Vanilla, Strawberry) * Orgain We'll start at 6 pm in the 3rd floor kitchen!