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← Alignment JamsThis hackathon ran from August 25th to August 27th 2023.
Join us for the Distillation Hackathon where you are tasked with working on more digestible versions of existing literature in AI safety research and theory!
You will be working on articles for aisafety.info. You can write new answers to questions people have, or edit existing drafts of answers.
See the information document for up-to-date information on the event, e.g. how the top projects are selected.
If you write articles in the course of the write-a-thon, and if you write on Stampy in general, your contributions are released under a permissive copyright.
The hackathon will run from August 25th, 7am UTC, to August 27th, 7am UTC. You are welcome to do any combination of writing articles, editing articles, and helping each other - all contributions will be considered part of the prize evaluations. See ‘how to participate’.
Collaboration on this event will happen on Discord and Gather. Feel free to join the discord ahead of time and introduce yourself!
There will be prizes for the best four entrants, who will win $1000, $600, $300, and $100. A random entrant (out of other serious entries) will win $200.
Here is the Schedule of events, a list of Suggested Questions to work on during the hackathon, the Article registration doc to register as the main person working on a question, and the Submission form for submitting your articles.
Schedule for the event. Visit the linked version.
Broadly, there are three ways to contribute: Writing, editing, and making suggestions. You can do any combination of these three throughout the event.
If you happen to have a particular subject related to AI safety that you know a lot about, we encourage you to work on articles about that; you can ask on Discord if articles on it already exist.
To see articles that need to be written, choose one from this list of suggested articles or this searchable list of questions from Coda. Alternatively, if you want to write an answer to a question that isn’t already in the system, you can ask on Discord for a doc to be created.
You can start writing in suggest mode on these articles at any time. If you would like to be the main author for an article, go to the Article registration doc and add the article along with your name and discord handle. We will probably give you edit access to the doc, (or you can ask to be given access on the discord if we seem to be taking a while).
Some articles already have drafts, and need editing. If you would like to work on these, you can choose one from this list of suggested articles (scroll down to ‘Editing’) or this searchable list of questions from Coda.
Articles being edited should have a main editor in charge of the article. If you would like to be the main editor of something, go to the Article registration doc and add the article along with your name and discord handle. We will probably give you edit access to the doc, (or you can ask to be given access on the discord if we seem to be taking a while).
To see questions others are already working answering on this weekend, go to the Article registration doc. Use google docs’ suggest and comment features to make suggestions and comments on the documents.
An answer for aisafety.info is usually a few paragraphs with links to outside resources (and internal links to other Stampy docs, if you want, though we can add them later instead). Take a look at existing articles for an idea of what to aim for.
We encourage people to collaborate on their articles. Hang out in the #distillation-write-a-thon channel on Discord and in gather.town (the Schelling point is the “alignment ecosystem development” room, but people can spread out into smaller working groups) to see what articles are in progress and get on calls about them or just make comments and suggestions on Discord or the doc. The submission document asks about who was helpful, and we will consider this in awarding prizes.
It’s probably a good idea to create a thread on the article you’re writing in the #editing channel, to serve as a central point for discussion on the article (along with the Google doc). You can tag @feedback in the Discord thread if you’re looking for feedback.
You’re allowed to use LLMs to help you, (we suggest this one; be aware that it logs questions where some of us can see them), as long as you mark this with a comment and you take responsibility for any hallucinations that the LLM generates (don’t do this unless you know enough about the subject to be able to judge whether it’s hallucinating).
As long as you have participated in the hackathon, you can fill out the submission form to be considered for prizes - even if you haven’t been the main author on any articles. The form will ask which other participants were helpful to you, so please try to keep track of who contributed.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask in the #distillation-write-a-thon channel, or to message Siao (@monstrologies), on Discord.
The Editor's hub contains answers to most of your questions! Check it out here.
We are focused specifically on AI existential safety (both introductory and technical questions), but do not aim to cover general AI questions or other topics which don't interact strongly with the effects of AI on humanity's long-term future. More technical questions are also in our scope, though replying to all possible proposals is not feasible and this is not a place to submit detailed ideas for evaluation.
We are interested in:
More good examples can be found on the answers table.
We do not aim to cover:
We will generally not delete out-of-scope content, but it will be reviewed as low priority to answer, not be marked as an accepted question, and not be served to readers on our UI.
As well as simply adding your own questions over at add question, you could also message your friends with something like:
Hi, I'm working on a project to create a comprehensive FAQ about AI alignment (you can read about it here https://aisafety.info?state=6436_ if interested). We're looking for questions and I thought you may have some good ones. If you'd be willing to write up a google doc with you top 5-10ish questions we'd be happy to write a personalized FAQ for you. https://coda.io/d/_dfau7sl2hmG/_susRF#_lubMU explains the kinds of questions we're looking for. Thanks!
and maybe bring the Google doc to a Stampy editing session so we can collaborate on answering them or improving your answers to them.
See the updated document. Don’t forget to register in this table if you intend to submit a doc as main author. Already claimed articles marked in [brackets].
Submit your project in the Google Forms below:
Big thanks to everyone who submitted their work. Your efforts have made this event a success and set a new bar for what we can expect in future editions of the hackathon!
We want to extend our appreciation to our judges Fazl Barez, Alex Foote, Esben Kran, and Bart Bussman and to our keynote speaker Neel Nanda. Rewatch the winning top 4 project lightning talks below.
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