AI Futures Project

We are interested in mentoring projects in AI forecasting, governance, and strategy. We want to improve the epistemic environment around thinking about AI risk by putting out concrete scenarios, exploring different dynamics and worlds that might happen, trying to forecast how things will go, and sometimes talking about how to deal with the risks. We hope that having better resources for thinking about the future will lead to better outcomes.

Stream overview

We are interested in mentoring projects in AI forecasting, governance, and AI strategy broadly. Potential projects include but aren't limited to:

  1. Scenario writing: Writing scenarios that branch off of AI 2027 or AI 2040, or that look at other important worlds and dynamics we think would be worth playing out.
  2. Policy research: Improving some of the policy ideas in AI 2040: Plan A and coming up with other policy ideas for different plans, for instance what good domestic regulation would look like in Plan B and Plan C, or versions of Plan A that work with less political will, etc. We're also open to people coming up with near-term policy recommendations or government asks that seem good on their own, or that help set up the world to do things like Plan A or a slowdown/pause in the future.
  3. Modeling / forecasting: We're potentially interested in people helping build or improve our modeling efforts. This could look like helping improve our economic modeling for scenarios, our timelines and takeoff modeling, compute modeling, or just generally thinking about variables that could have big impacts on the world during the intelligence explosion and modeling and forecasting how they'll go, etc.
  4. Other types of strategy research: We're open to people thinking about other kinds of AI strategy work, for instance space governance, how bad concentration of power is relative to takeover risk, model spec research, etc.
Mentorship style:

High-touch (+2 hours of weekly 1:1s)

Location during program:

SF Bay Area

London location preference:

Indifferent

Berkeley location preference:

Strong preference

Mentors

Romeo Dean
AI Futures Project
,
研究员
Policy and Governance
Forecasting and Strategy
AI 系统安全
AI 技术治理
结构性风险与社会动态

Romeo 正与 AI 未来项目合作,预测详细的 AI 发展情景并制定政策建议。他主要关注算力与安全领域的预测。此前,他曾是 IAPS 政策研究员,并在哈佛大学同时攻读计算机科学硕士学位,研究方向为系统与硬件。

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Thomas Larsen
AI Futures Project
,
研究员
Policy and Governance
Forecasting and Strategy
结构性风险与社会动态

Thomas 是 AI 未来项目的研究员,也是广受关注的 AI 2027 情景预测报告的共同作者。他此前创立了 AI 安全倡导组织 Center for AI Policy,并曾在机器智能研究所开展 AI 安全研究。

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Daniel Kokotajlo
AI Futures Project
,
Executive Director
Policy and Governance
Forecasting and Strategy
AI 技术治理
结构性风险与社会动态

Daniel is working on forecasting detailed AI scenarios with Eli Lifland, Thomas Larsen, Jonas Vollmer, and Romeo Dean.

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Eli Lifland
AI Futures Project
,
Researcher
Policy and Governance
Forecasting and Strategy
结构性风险与社会动态

Eli is working on AI scenario forecasting with the AI Futures Project, where he co-authored AI 2027. He advises Sage, an organization he cofounded that works on AI Digest (interactive AI explainers) and forecasting tools. He previously worked on the AI-powered research assistant Elicit.

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Fellows we are looking for

The most important characteristics include:

  1. Strong reasoning and writing abilities
  2. Excitement about AI forecasting/governance research
  3. Autonomous research skills
  4. Ability to learn quickly

Also important, but not required characteristics include:

  1. Significant background knowledge in at least one area relevant to AI forecasting and governance (e.g. government experience, technical background, etc.)
  2. Significant background knowledge in AGI and existential risks

Project selection

We will talk through project ideas with scholar