We need more local AI safety hubs

No one will help your country prepare for superintelligence except the people who live there

I’ve met many capable and concerned people while advising BlueDot graduates from all over the world on how to contribute to AI safety.

Many of them are willing to uproot their lives to move abroad to work closer to the frontier. They end up in more developed countries, where there is a higher ceiling for growth, a more established community, and more money.

But there are others who choose to stay closer to home because of patriotism, family, mortgage or preference.

I used to wonder what they could do when so much of the discourse on AI safety is centred on the US and China and the frontier companies housed within them.

More and more experts argue that middle powers — the nations that are not building frontier AI — are not spectators. There are things they can do to ride the impending wave, to even influence it. Whether that is by ensuring continued access to frontier AI, investing in research, building resilience or forming coalitions.

However, these ideas need to be driven by people who care about the fate of their country and understand it well enough to both develop and execute the strategy. No one will help your country but the people whose lives will be affected by it.

The people who are usually best placed to do this are those who care and choose to stay. Local hubs are how they find each other and begin taking action. We need more of them.

The goal of local hubs

Figuring out how your country should navigate this transformative technology is no easy feat. It requires talent, money and strategy.

• Talent means capable people working full-time on the problem.

• Money to fund promising work, and attract and retain the talent to execute on it.

• Strategy to steer talent and money towards solving the right problem.

Hubs are how you get talent. Without people, there’s nothing to fund and no one to build the strategy.

In London, I could point people interested in AI safety to the London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA), in Singapore to the Singapore AI Safety Hub (SASH), in Toronto to Trajectory Labs, in New York to Collider.

These hubs run fellowships and community events, and offer co-working space for new organisations. They gather the people seriously working on AI safety in one place, and with them, a sense of energy, momentum, the sense that you are not alone.

A women in AI safety event I could easily organise in London thanks to the support of LISA.

A hub becomes the place where like-minded individuals meet, where new orgs grow, where fellowships attract talent to work on AI safety, where people find support to spend hundreds of hours understanding the challenges of AI safety and figuring out what to do about it. They provide a focal point for collaborators across academia, government, and industry to converge.

Middle powers will need this talent to help them develop and execute a national AI strategy. And they will need these hubs to attract and develop that talent.

Local AI safety hubs do exist

There are a few success stories you can look to:

Buenos Aires AI Safety Hub (BAISH)

Eitán Sprejer and Luca De Leo were students at the University of Buenos Aires when they noticed that Chile, Brazil and Colombia all had AI safety groups but Argentina didn’t, so they decided to start one.

The idea began as a final project for the ML4Good bootcamp. They built a small core team, ran events and courses they cared about (like BlueDot’s Technical AI safety course), and borrowed a room from a sympathetic professor. A later Pathfinder Fellowship stipend enabled them to devote more hours to running it.

Since then, BAISH has grown to a team of 16 volunteers, a community of over 250 members and continues to run fellowships and publish research. Their programs have attracted local technical talent and helped place them in fellowships such as MATS, ARENA and ERA.

London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA)

In 2023, London had many of the ingredients for AI safety research (e.g. talent, universities, proximity to frontier labs like Google DeepMind), but no dedicated infrastructure to bring people together. The team running MATS’s London cohorts saw the gap first-hand: researchers finishing the programme were capable but had nowhere to land, and working alone made them far less productive.

So the co-founders of MATS (Ryan Kidd and Christian Smith), James Fox, and Mike Brozowski, who ran MATS’s London operations, opened LISA to create a space for AI safety researchers and the small organisations forming around them.

Today LISA houses organisations like Apollo Research, ARENA and BlueDot Impact alongside many independent researchers, and has become a focal point for London’s AI safety community.

Singapore AI Safety Hub (SASH)

Miro Pluckebaum wanted Asia to have its own AI safety hub after seeing the thriving communities in LISA and Constellation. He believed Singapore would be a good place to start. He needed someone on the ground and was introduced to Valerie Pang, who was looking to apply her experience in community building, events and marketing to AI safety.

They started by setting up a co-working space and running events to build the community, funded by an initial grant from the AI Safety Tactical Opportunities Fund (AISTOF). Lorong AI, a government initiative to build an AI hub, invited SASH to co-locate with it. That proximity enabled SASH to interact and collaborate with various government agencies on projects. Rather than build from scratch, SASH partnered with others to run programs like ARENA, ML4Good, and AI Safety Collab locally, and to co-organise events with orgs like Safe AI Forum, FAR AI, and Concordia AI.

As they gained traction, they raised additional funding from AISTOF, the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) and other grantmakers. Today, SASH has an online community of over 600 members, 10 staff, collaborations with governments and universitied, and a growing number of programs.

Start small

You don’t need funding, a plan, or permission to start. Many local AI safety hubs started with a handful of committed people.

They grew their communities by experimenting with events, weekly reading groups working through curricula like BlueDot’s AGI Strategy course, or co-working once a week. They started with what was valuable to their core members and invested in outreach to pull in more people.

This builds the case for a seed grant. But what matters most to funders is evidence your hub will be impactful. This might be the local talent you’re attracting, the traction of your activities or existing government interest.

As you start thinking about your hub’s theory of change, I’d recommend reading these resources on middle power strategy:

• The Moonshot by Anton Leicht

• The Race Worth Winning: Middle Powers in the Age of Machine Intelligence by The Foundation for American Innovation

• The Winning Essays for the Big Questions About AI by Dwarkesh Patel

• What can middle powers do for frontier AI governance? By Markus Anderljung and Stephen Clare

• How AI Safety Is Getting Middle Powers Wrong by Anton Leicht

If you’re at a university, you could apply for the Pathfinder Fellowship to start a chapter. If you’re seriously considering setting up a local hub, reach out to LISA (info@safeai.org.uk) for advice or apply for a rapid grant with BlueDot.

Work in public as you go! Post and get feedback on your early ideas. Attend online meet-ups or EA Global conferences to connect with others working on similar projects. You won’t be the first to build a local hub, so lean on their experience.

You can make a difference

It’s easy to feel powerless, to watch billions of dollars go into rapidly accelerating the capabilities of AI systems, to feel as if the future is being dictated somewhere else, by someone else.

But no one cares about your country more than the people who live in it.

Local hubs are how they find each other, turn that care into action, and eventually draw home the ones who left. That’s how your country builds the talent to thrive in the age of superintelligence.

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Special thanks to Eitán Sprejer, Kris Bar and Valerie Pang for contributing advice from their personal experience running local hubs!