March 2024 AI Alignment project prize categories
As foretold by the mysterious ‘coming soon’ in the project guidance, there are prizes for the March 2024 AI alignment course project sprint!
These are meant to celebrate great achievements, highlight exceptional work, and incentivise working on important parts of problems.
Prize categories
Best organisation building project: £200
Runner up prize: £50
Planning on founding a new organisation, or significantly influencing a key AI safety organisation’s strategy? This winning project will set out a clear theory of change for this new organisation, and you’ll have taken concrete steps down the path of making it happen!
Best interactive deliverable: £200
Runner up prize: £50
This prize recognises the importance of communicating your work, rewarding creating an engaging and interactive deliverable, such as a visualisation, game, simulation, website, or other tool that allow users to explore your project results. The winning project will effectively communicate an important idea from your project in an interesting and accessible manner.
Best AI education, outreach or community building project: £100
We strongly believe in the importance of education and community building to developing the AI safety field - otherwise we wouldn’t be running this course! The winning project will demonstrate a commitment to building a stronger AI safety ecosystem that is working on AI safety more effectively.
Best scalable oversight project: £100
This prize is for a top project submission focusing on a scalable oversight technique, as defined in our intro article. The winning project will make a significant contribution to the scalable oversight field, likely through novel research or building a new organisation, product or open-source library that leverages these techniques.
Best interpretability project: £100
This prize is for a top project submission focusing on mechanistic or developmental interpretability. The winning project will make a significant contribution to one of these fields, likely through novel research or building a new organisation, product or open-source library that leverages these techniques.
Best AI governance project: £200
Runner up prize: £50
This prize highlights projects that contribute to advancing solutions for AI governance challenges. The winning project will have made significant progress advancing a particular AI governance intervention: for example by doing novel research in the real world, building the technical tools to enable an intervention, or planning precisely how to implement a certain solution (or better yet, figuring out the plan and then making this happen).
Best AI forecasting, risk analysis or strategy project: £100
This category recognises the value in understanding the future trajectory of AI technology and its potential impacts. The winning project will offer valuable insights into the potential opportunities, risks, or challenges associated with the continued development or deployment of AI systems. These insights will not just summarise what is already known, but will represent a novel contribution that ideally changes the way we think about and prioritise work in AI safety.
Other highlighted projects
We’ll be awarding smaller prizes, such as AI safety books, to some other selected projects we think are particularly impressive and important for the AI safety field.
The guidelines above describe of how we currently intend to judge the projects, but the exact criteria may change. All prizes will be awarded at the discretion of the BlueDot Impact team.
Working on your projects
Over the last few days we’ve read your project details forms and were hugely excited about what you’re all building. Given the strength of applications this round, and the great discussions we’ve been seeing across cohorts, we’re confident that you have the knowledge and skills to do them well!
Hopefully these prizes have raised the stakes a little, and you’re even more keen to get stuck into the project sprint - if you haven’t already, you should be starting your rapid project tests. We can’t wait to see what you build!