Import AI 461: "Alignment is not on track"; FrontierCode; and synthetic research interns

Import AI · 1 month ago

Researchers from the UK AI Security Institute and alignment startup Timaeus formed Sequent, a new nonprofit organization aiming to develop alignment techniques for superintelligent AI systems because current approaches at major labs lack principled safety guarantees. Sequent plans to grow to 40-80 employees within a couple of years and initially raise $100-150 million, with readiness to seek at least ten times that amount. The organization will pursue a portfolio of diverse alignment research directions including scalable oversight, learning theory, and game theory, with the goal of demonstrating confidence that alignment observed during training generalizes to real-world deployment.