Past Events

A high-context Career Fair for people who are ready to move in AI safety: into roles, into founding, into deploying capital. Who's this for? You're a career pivoter, an aspiring founder, a hiring org, or a funder. You have meaningful AI safety context and a clear conviction this is where you want to spend the next chapter. If you joined us for the Breaking Barriers Hackathon, this is where you bring what you built. The day combines three formats: 🛠 Workshops running alongside the career fair: -What it takes to found an AI safety org from zero -What makes a great funding application -Speedrun your AI safety job search 🎤 Discussions Various parts of the ecosystem come together to talk about the current funding landscape, where the real research gaps are, and what it actually takes to found an AI safety organization. 🤝 Career Fair Open floor with hiring organizations tabling. No structured speed-networking. Just direct conversations with the people doing the hiring. If your organization is growing, register here: https://tinyurl.com/org-breaking-barriers. If you are unable to attend, you can opt in for a talent directory of the attendees. If you would like to volunteer, fill out this form: https://tinyurl.com/vol-breaking-barriers

A high-context Career Fair for people who are ready to move in AI safety: into roles, into founding, into deploying capital. Who's this for? You're a career pivoter, an aspiring founder, a hiring org, or a funder. You have meaningful AI safety context and a clear conviction this is where you want to spend the next chapter. If you joined us for the Breaking Barriers Hackathon, this is where you bring what you built. The day combines three formats: 🛠 Workshops running alongside the career fair: -What it takes to found an AI safety org from zero -What makes a great funding application -Speedrun your AI safety job search 🎤 Discussions Various parts of the ecosystem come together to talk about the current funding landscape, where the real research gaps are, and what it actually takes to found an AI safety organization. 🤝 Career Fair Open floor with hiring organizations tabling. No structured speed-networking. Just direct conversations with the people doing the hiring. If your organization is growing, register here: https://tinyurl.com/org-breaking-barriers. If you are unable to attend, you can opt in for a talent directory of the attendees. If you would like to volunteer, fill out this form: https://tinyurl.com/vol-breaking-barriers

Activation explainers — methods that translate an LLM's hidden activations into natural language — are gaining traction in interpretability. Activation Oracles do this by fine-tuning a full copy of the model, but that's overkill and means the explainer no longer matches the subject model. In this talk, Keenan Pepper (AE Studio) presents a lighter alternative: training a single affine map that turns a layer-N activation into a soft token the frozen model can read at layer 0. The trained adapter produces labels that beat SAE auto-interp training labels on two metrics, decodes unverbalized "bridge entities" in two-hop reasoning more reliably than untrained SelfIE or linear probes, and improves with scale. We'll close with speculation on what the frozen-model property might eventually buy us. More on the research here: https://ae.studio/research/selfie

How large a software project can an AI system complete autonomously? ​Join ⁨⁨Tom Adamczewski⁩ and Epoch AI for a look at MirrorCode, a benchmark co-developed with METR for long-horizon coding. ​We’ll discuss what MirrorCode reveals about current AI coding capabilities, how to evaluate weeks-long autonomous work, and the methodological challenges of measuring progress on real software projects. ​Learn more: https://epoch.ai/MirrorCode

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!