A community at UW–Madison dedicated to making AI safe and beneficial for all.
Our Mission
We believe that AI presents a magnitude of risks and benefits unmatched by any previous technology. To realize the benefits, we must address the risks.
We contribute by:
•Building and supporting a community of AI Safety specialists.
•Producing impactful research across disciplines.
•Informing public discourse on transformative AI.
Our goal: help humanity navigate the transition to advanced AI wisely.
"It's been great working with everyone and getting to be around people who are really interested in AI Safety and helping people get involved. It's exciting to be a part of this."
— Shawn Im, PhD Student
Numbers and Beyond
- 10 PhD Safety Scholars
- 6 Masters Safety Scholars
- 50+ Undergraduate Safety Scholars
- 30 Current AI Safety Fundamentals participants
- 130+ AI Safety Fundamentals graduates
"...A year ago the idea of facilitating a group discussion would've been hugely intimidating to me but now I find myself looking forward to my cohort sessions. This much needed nudge out of my comfort zone has shaped my growth as a leader and student..."
— Elise Fischer, Policy Team
Involvement and Impact
- 9 WAISI members were flown out to DC to participate in a Congressional Exhibition on Advanced AI.
- Contributed to Wisconsin's 2023 Assembly Bill 664, which requires disclosing AI-generated material in political ads.
- Hosted speakers from Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and the Horizon Institute for Public Service.
- Members in 12+ research labs on campus. See our research page.
- Collaborated with professors from the School of Computer, Data, and Information Sciences, the School of Education, the School of Business, and the Department of Philosophy.
Opportunities
Technical Fundamentals
An eight-week research-oriented reading group on technical AI safety. Topics include reward specification, generalization, interpretability...
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Policy Fundamentals
An eight-week reading group on the foundational governance and policy challenges posed by advanced AI systems. Topics include AI harms...
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Technical Upskilling
Build foundational machine learning knowledge and get an overview of major AI safety topics. Receive a certificate of completion after finishing the program...
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Current Projects
WAISI Technical AI Safety Workshop Program
Most AI Safety communities introduce members who are interested in technical AI safety through the pipeline of Intro Technical Fellowship → Paper Reading Sessions → Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator program (ARENA)...
Learn more →Transferable Adversarial Materials (TAM)
Within the past decade, small portable Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) operated by individual infantry units have been demonstrated to be vital assets on the battlefield in intelligence, surveillance...
Learn more →Research Highlights
Towards Interpretability Without Sacrifice: Faithful Dense Layer Decomposition with Mixture of Decoders
Debate or Vote: Which Yields Better Decisions in Multi-Agent Large Language Models?
Everything Everywhere All at Once: LLMs can In-Context Learn Multiple Tasks in Superposition
Our Members Have Collaborated With
Our Sponsors
Kairos
UW-Madison Computer Sciences