Building expertise in AI alignment research

The AFFINE Fellowship is a year-long extension of the Seminar, offered to the ~10 most promising participants. Selection is aimed at collaborative, not individual, excellence. We’re looking for participants who help others learn, integrate across disciplines, and build rather than hoard knowledge.

The goal extends beyond producing ten exciting researchers. We want to create a cohesive network that continues collaborating after the month ends, whether at CEEALAR or at a European hub of our own. To encourage ambitious approaches and blue sky bets with no guarantee of bearing fruit, we do not force a promising piece of research within the one-year frame, though it would be a very welcome surprise.

We actively encourage a collaborative spirit within the environment, even in the face of potential adversarial pressures arising from the competition for Fellowship positions.

Vision: A community of researchers where fruitful ideas thrive. The role of the mentor is to help fellows learn, think, and research; in particular, to think with them in a way that makes them better learners, thinkers, and researchers in the long run.

Our ideal is that the mentor-mentee relationship be many-to-many, rather than one-to-one as is typical. Private consultations will obviously still happen and a participant might be especially excited about a specific mentor or vice versa, but research styles and expertise vary in ways that would make it stifling for our attendees to follow a single assigned guide. What we want is for much of the communication to be spent making connections between mentors, so their ways of thinking (differences, similarities, bridges) can be explored and explicated in the open. There can be little more useful to our mentees than to experience scientific discourse in action.