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 happens because of collaborative excellence, not despite it. We're looking for participants who help others learn, integrate across disciplines, and build rather than hoard knowledge.

The goal extends beyond producing ten individual researchers to creating a cohesive network that continues collaborating after the month ends, whether at CEEALAR or elsewhere. To encourage ambitious approaches not guaranteed to work, we do not expect novel and promising research outputs within the one-year time frame, though it would be a very welcome surprise.

We actively encourage collaboration to cultivate the collaborative spirit of the environment, even in the face of potential adversariality arising from competition for extended 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. We'd like much of the communication to be spent building connections between mentors, so their ways of thinking (differences, similarities, bridges) can be explored and explicated in the open. This broadens mentees' exposure to different potentially valuable ideas.