EA - Chilean AIS Hackathon Retrospective by Agustín Covarrubias

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Chilean AIS Hackathon Retrospective, published by Agustín Covarrubias on May 9, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TL;DRWe hosted an AI Safety “Thinkathon” in Chile. We had participation from 40 students with differing skill levels and backgrounds, with groups totalling 13 submissions.We see potential in:Similar introductory events aiming for a broad audienceCollaborating more often with student organizationsLeveraging remote help from external mentorsWe experimented with an alternative naming, having remote mentors, different problem sources, and student organization partnerships, with varying results.We could have improved planning and communicating the difficulty of challenges.IntroductionIn February, we ran the first AI Safety Hackathon in Chile (and possibly in all of South America). This post provides some details about the event, a teaser of some resulting projects and our learnings throughout.Goals and overview of the eventThe hackathon was meant to kick-start our nascent AI Safety Group at UC Chile, generating interest in AI Safety and encouraging people to register for our AGI Safety Fundamentals course group.It ran between the 25th and the 28th of February, the first two days being in-person events and the other two serving as additional time for participants to work on their proposals, with some remote assistance on our part. Participants formed teams of up to four people, and could choose to assist either virtually (through Discord) or in-person (on the first two days).We had help from Apart Research and partial funding from AI Alignment Awards.Things we experimented withAiming for a broad audience, we named the event “Thinkathon” (instead of hackathon) and provided plenty of introductory material alongside the proposed problems.We think this was the right choice, as the desired effect was reflected on the participant demographics (see below).We could have been better at preparing participants. Some participants suggested we could have done an introductory workshop.We incorporated the two problems from the AI Alignment Awards (Goal Misgeneralization and the Shutdown problem), alongside easier, self-contained problems aimed at students with different backgrounds (like policy or psychology).We think most teams weren't prepared to tackle the AI Alignment Awards challenges. Most teams (77%) chose them initially regardless of their experience, getting stuck quickly.This might have worked better by communicating difficulty more clearly, as well as emphasizing that aiming for incremental progress rather than a complete solution is a better strategy for a beginner's hackathon.As we don't know many people with previous experience in AIS in Chile, we got help from external mentors, which connected remotely to help participants.We think this was a good decision, as participants rated mentor support highly (see below).We collaborated actively with two student governments from our university (the Administration and Economics Student Council and the Engineering Student Council). They helped with funding, logistics and outreach.We think this was an excellent choice, as they provided a much broader platform for outreach and crucial logistics help.We had a great time working with them, and they were eager to work with us again!Things that went well40 people attended in-person and 10 people remotely (through Discord), we were surprised by both the high number of attendants and the preference for in-person participation.We had a total of 13 submitted proposals, much higher than expected.While all proposals were incremental contributions, most were of high quality.Skill level and majors varied significantly, going from relatively advanced CS students to freshmen from other fields (like economics). We were aiming for diversity, so this is a w...