EA - ALTER Israel - 2023 Mid-Year Update by Davidmanheim

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: ALTER Israel - 2023 Mid-Year Update, published by Davidmanheim on June 6, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.ALTER is an organization in Israel that works on several EA priority areas and causes. This semiannual update is intended to inform the community of what we have been doing, and provide a touchpoint for those interested in engaging with us. Since the last update at the beginning of 2023, we have made progress on a number of areas, and have ambitious ideas for future projects.Progress to DateSince its founding, ALTER has started and run a number of projects.Organized and managed an AI safety conference in Israel, AISIC 2022 hosted at the Technion, bringing in several international speakers including Stuart Russell, to highlight AI Safety focused on existential-risk and global-catastrophic-risk, to researchers and academics in Israel. This was successful in raising the profile of AI safety here in Israel, and in helping identify prospective collaborators and researchers.Support for Vanessa Kosoy’s Learning-Theoretic Safety Agenda, including an ongoing prize competition, and work to hire researchers working in the area.Worked with Israel’s foreign ministry, academics here in Israel, and various delegations to and organizations at the Biological Weapons Convention to find avenues to promote Israel’s participation.Launched our project to get the Israeli government to iodize salt, to mitigate or eliminate the current iodine deficiency that we estimate causes an expected 4-IQ point loss to the median child born in Israel today.Worked on mapping the current state of metagenomic sequencing usage in Israel, in order to prepare for a potential use of widespread metagenomic monitoring for detecting novel pathogens.Organized and hosted a closed Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky while he was visiting Israel, for 20 people in Israel working on or interested in contributing to AI safety. This was followed by a larger LessWrong meetup with additional attendees.Current and Ongoing WorkWe have a number of ongoing projects related to both biorisk and AI safety.Fellowship program. We have started this program to support researchers interested in developing research agendas relevant to AI safety. Ram Rahum is our inaugural funded AI safety fellow, who was found via our AI Safety conference. Since then, he has co-organized a conference in London on rebellion and disobedience in AI jointly with academics in Israel, the US, and the UK. As a fellow, he is also continuing to work with academics in Israel as well as a number of researchers at Deep Mind on understanding strategic deception and multi-agent games and dynamics for ML systems. His research home is here and monthly updates are here. Rona Tobolsky is a policy fellow, and is also working with us on policy, largely focused on biorisk and iodization.Support for Vanessa Kosoy’s Learning-Theoretic AI Safety Agenda. To replace the former FTX funding, we have been promised funding from an EA donor lottery to fund a researcher working on the learning-theoretic safety agenda. We are working on recruiting a new researcher, and are excited about expanding this. Relatedly, we are helping support a singular learning theory workshop.Biosecurity. David Manheim and Rona Tobolsky attended the Biological Weapons Convention - Ninth Review Conference, and have continued looking at ways to push for greater participation by Israel, which is not currently a member. David will also be attending a UNIDIR conference on biorisk in July. We are also continuing to explore additional pathways for Israel to contribute to global pandemic preparedness, especially around PPE and metagenomic biosurveillance.AI field building. Alongside other work to build AI-safety work in Israel, ALTER helped initiate a round of the AGI Safety Fundamentals 101 program...