Help us launch AI safety university groups by referring potential founders

TL;DR

University groups are among the most reliable producers of AI safety talent, yet dozens of top schools that could sustain a group don't have one.

We're launching the AI Safety Seeding Initiative ( aisafetyseeding.org ) in partnership with Kairos to identify latent founders at these schools, support them in the group’s earliest stages, and prepare them to apply to Pathfinder and launch this fall.

You can help us find potential founders. If you know a student at a strong university without an AIS group (see this list [1] ), refer us to them.

There aren’t enough AI safety university groups

University groups are one of the most common routes into AI safety work: a 2023 survey of people working on catastrophic risks found university group involvement was the single most common career influence. Dedicated field-building organizations like Kairos exist largely to support these groups, and the ceiling for their success is high: groups like MAIA, AISST, and BASIS have grown from paper-reading groups into some of the field's strongest talent pipelines [2]. It is not uncommon for top talent to go from “vaguely interested student” to full-time hire in 6-12 months.

Kairos's Pathfinder fellowship does a great job of providing existing founders with mentorship, funding, and resources to ensure their groups are impactful. But Kairos doesn't yet have the capacity to systematically search for and reach out to good candidates for Pathfinder. This means that today, a group forms only when a rare student fits a narrow path:

They know about AI safety, despite being at a university with no group to introduce them to it.

They're high-context enough to know that support like Pathfinder exists, either from a lot of lurking online, attending an event like an EAG or GCP, or a direct recommendation.

They have enough self-initiative [3] to start a group at their school, and are willing to pay the costs of founding [4].

Our central bet is that there already exist capable would-be…