Upcoming Events

  • AI Safety Thursdays: Avoiding Gradual Disempowerment

    ​Thursday, July 3rd, 6pm-8pm

    This talk will explore the concept of gradual disempowerment as an alternative to the abrupt takeover scenarios often discussed in AI safety. Dr David Duvenaud will examine how even incremental improvements in AI capabilities can erode human influence over critical societal systems, including the economy, culture, and governance.

    RSVP Here

  • AI Policy Tuesdays: Tort Law and Frontier AI Governance

    Tuesday, July 8, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m

    Kathrin Gardhouse will be presenting on the role that tort law can play in ensuring responsible AI development before and after regulatory regimes are established.

    RSVP Here

  • AI Safety Thursdays: Are LLMs aware of their learned behaviors?

    Thursday, July 10th​, 6pm-8pm

    At this event, we'll explore self-awareness in LLMs, as described in the paper Tell me about yourself: LLMs are aware of their learned behaviors. Guiding us through the topic will be one of the paper's co-authors, Jenny Bao.

    RSVP Here

  • AI Safety Thursdays: Self-Other Overlap - Follow Up

    Thursday. July 17th, 6pm - 8pm

    Leo Zovic will take us on a quick tour of some Self-Other Overlap work done on small LLMs since our last SOO event. We'll focus on understanding the experimental setup, its implications, outcomes and objections.

    RVSP Here

  • AI Policy Tuesday: The Future of Canadian AI Governance

    Tuesday, July 22nd, 6pm-8pm

    At this event, we'll exploring the current trajectory of AI governance under Canada's new federal government.

    Wim Howson Creutzberg will take us through what concrete actions have been taken, and what we can expect in the coming months and years.

    RVSP Here

  • AI Safety Thursdays: Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats

    Thursday, July 24th, 6pm - 8pm​

    Can AI agents misbehave while carrying out actions autonomously? At this event, Giles Edkins will guide us through a look at and critique some research by Anthropic that demonstrates blackmail and other phenomena when an agent is threatened with shutdown or reprogramming.

    RVSP Here

  • Apart Research Hackathon: AI Safety x Physics Grand Challenge

    Saturday, July 26th, 10:00am - Sunday, July 27th, 10:00pm

    We are excited to host a jamsite for Apart Research and Martian's upcoming AI Safety x Physics Grand Challenge hackathon.

    ​Register on the Apart Research event page.

    RSVP Here

  • AI Safety Thursdays: The Intelligence Curse

    Thursday, July 31st, 6pm - 8pm

    ​As AI approaches human-level capabilities, Mario Gibney explores "The Intelligence Curse"—how automation could make human labor obsolete and break the social contract between powerful actors and regular people. We'll explore possible strategies for building AI that augments rather than replaces humans, ensuring people remain relevant in the intelligence age.

    RVSP Here

Past Events

  • AI Policy Tuesdays: Agent Governance

    Tuesday, June 24th.

    Kathrin Gardhousepresents on the nascent field of Agent Governance, drawing from a recent report by IAPS.

    ​The presentation will cover current agent capabilities, expected developments, governance challenges, and proposed solutions.

  • Hackathon: Apart x Martian Mechanistic Router Interpretability Hackathon

    Friday, May 30 - Sunday, Jun 1.

    We are excited to host a jamsite for Apart Research and Martian's upcoming hackathon.

  • AI Safety Thursdays: Advanced AI's Impact on Power and Society

    ​Thursday, May 29th, 6pm-8pm

    Historically, significant technological shifts often coincide with political instability, and sometimes violent transfers of power. Should we expect AI to follow this pattern, or are there reasons to hope for a smooth transition to the post AI world?

    ​Anson Ho draws upon economic models, broad historical trends, and recent developments in deep learning to guide us through an exploration of this question.

  • AI Safety Thursdays: Extreme Sycophancy in GPT-4o

    Thursday, May 8, 2025.

    On April 25th, Openai deployed an update to ChatGPT GPT‑4o, and in the week that followed, it was clear that it had become concerningly more sycophantic, being willing to encourage and praise its users in extreme ways that ranged from comical to dangerous.

    ​At this event, Mario Gibney guided a discussion of what happened, why, how OpenAI responded, and what we can learn from it.

  • AI + Human Flourishing: Policy Levers for AI Governance

    Sunday, May 4, 2025.

    Considerations of AI governance are increasingly urgent as powerful models become more capable and widely deployed. Kathrin Gardhouse delivered a presentation on the available mechanisms we can use to govern AI, from policy levers to technical AI governance. It was a high-level introduction to the world of AI policy to get a sense of the lay of the land.

  • AI Safety Thursday: "AI-2027"

    Thursday April 24th, 2025.

    On April 3rd, a team of AI experts and superforecasters at The AI Futures Project, published a narrative called AI-2027 outlining a possible scenario of explosive AI development and takeover occurring during the coming 2 years.

    Mario Gibney guided us through a presentation and discussion of the scenario where we explore how likely it is to actually track reality in the coming years.

See Our Past Events Here