AI labs underinvest in theory and other principled approaches to alignment, and we will aim to fill this gap. Theory won’t be strong enough for guarantees: our goal is to combine evidence from theoretical models and empirics to increase overall confidence or find hard obstacles.

Please reach out if you’re interested in working with us! Sequent will have a large in-person presence in Berkeley, as well as researchers remote from London, Melbourne, and elsewhere. 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇦🇺

1. Full post: http://sequent.org/launch 2. Express interest: http://sequent.org/apply

We believe Sequent will have reputation + funding to recruit world-class teams in many areas. Our initial team knows scalable oversight, complexity + learning theory, and personas. Areas we love include agent foundations, game theory, and heuristic arguments. Please pitch more!

Theory makes automation more likely to work: the models are great at prose math and Lean, which means significant acceleration even while most research taste comes from humans. But good automation is still hard: a single org will let us amortize the challenge across many areas.

Different research bets can help each other! Partial successes from one area will fill the gaps in others, increasing the value of bringing them together in one organization, and will focus on fast publication for sharing and engagement with the broader community. ❤️

I'm excited to work with you, @danielmurfet!

@danielmurfet I'm excited to work with you, @jesse_hoogland!

@geoffreyirving AF link broke

@gleech Thank you, should be fixed!

Excited to see a new @geoffreyirving group pursuing a portfolio approach to alignment!

Great thesis: "theory unlocks higher automation"

@geoffreyirving Congratulations @geoffreyirving - our organisation will definitely reach out for potential areas of synergy....