FAR.Labs x Ai Salon: The AI Safety Funding Landscape
Expert Series: AI Risk Narratives & Public Outreach (Pilot Session)
📣 FAR.Labs and Ai Salon have partnered up to pilot a new series of events focused on moderated, single-threaded conversations about AI safety and adjacent topics. We're currently piloting three types of expert series, starting with Series 1:
1. AI Risk Narratives & Public Outreach
2. AI Policy & Institutional Reform
3. AI & Collective Well-being
📌 Topic Overview
AI safety funding increasingly flows toward technical alignment research and catastrophic risk mitigation: how does this influence work being done on algorithmic accountability and near-term harms? This salon explores the political economy of AI safety, and how funding priorities shape perspectives on harm and agency. We'll examine how philanthropic capital, government grants, and industry investment shapes which problems get solved and which communities get protected.
Join us to explore three guiding questions:
How do funding priorities shape perspectives on harm? Does money from longtermist/EA philanthropy groups, government agencies, or industry partnerships privilege certain research agendas over others? If so, how?
Which types of organizations benefit from the current resource allocation in AI safety, and which groups are being overlooked?
Are there structural interventions that could broaden the range of AI safety work that gets supported? What might it look like to diversify AI safety funding?
🗓️ Logistics
⏱️ Come early to grab dinner and connect! Dinner will be served by FAR.Labs around 5:45 PM, while the Salon discussion will run from 6:30 - 8:00PM, followed by optional networking from 8-8:30pm.
📍The Salon will be hosted in the 2nd Floor Seminar room, directly across from the kitchen.
🚨 To facilitate smooth and cohesive conversations, please arrive no later than 6:30pm, which is when the conversation will begin.
🔎 About Ai Salon & FAR.Labs
The Ai Salon is a global community founded in San Francisco focused on intimate, small-sized group discussions on the sociological, economic, cultural, and philosophical impacts and meaning of AI developments. We host small group discussions, all of which you can find on our calendar. You can find summaries of our previous conversations on our substack.
FAR.Labs is a co-working hub in downtown Berkeley dedicated to supporting the AI safety research community and related fields. It's operated by FAR.AI, an AI safety research non-profit. At FAR.AI, our mission is to ensure advanced AI is safe and beneficial for everyone. We spark much-needed technical breakthroughs through our in-house research team and targeted grants to academic research groups. We also bring together policymakers, industry leaders and academics to foster a coordinated global solution for safe AI development.
Please be advised: Unfortunately, space is very limited at these community events and we can't always accept everyone we'd like to. We base acceptances based on levels of interest and passion demonstrated in registration question answers. If you are not accepted to this event, please try and come to another!