We welcome various levels of experience as SPAR mentors and adjust the bar for the rigor of the project proposal accordingly.

If you are a senior graduate student, postdoc, academic faculty member, or technical staff member in an AI lab, you can suggest any AI safety project.

If you are a junior graduate student or a MATS scholar, your project should be adjacent to your research focus.

In every other case, it must be very clear that you have legible credentials to lead the project you propose. We’ll consider projects proposed by undergraduate students only in exceptional cases.

SPAR projects typically run for three months. Depending on the size of the project and the commitment of the mentor/mentees, projects can receive anywhere between 5 and 100 hours of work per week (collectively). We are excited about hosting projects focused on AI safety, AI policy and governance, AI strategy, or AI security,

The most important criteria is for project topics to address catastrophic risks from AI. This could be through either technical approaches (technical AI safety or AI security), policy and governance approaches, or strategy (e.g., AI forecasting or communications).

Alignment research examples:

• Goal misgeneralization (ex. Langosco et al. 2021)

• Reward misspecification (ex. Casper et al. 2023)

• Agent foundations (ex. Soares and Fallenstein 2014)

Governance research:

• Reviews of risk assessment techniques (ex. Koessler & Schuett 2023)
  

• Proposals for international coordination (ex. Stafford & Trager 2022)

Safety engineering:

• Building a filtering system for LLM outputs

• Replications of ML safety papers or techniques

• Developing a red-teaming UI

The SPAR team sends you an Airtable view of your applicants sometime early in the mentee application phase. You can begin to select and interview mentees whenever you like throughout that phase. We, by default expect mentors to reach out to all their candidates about interviews or acceptances. If you would like the SPAR team to handle those messages, please email us and we will send them out that day!

SPAR applicants are a mix of undergraduate students, graduate students, and professionals. We expect applicants to have some relevant technical background to the projects at hand, but by default, don’t expect research experience.

At present, neither SPAR mentors nor mentees receive any funding from SPAR. That said, we do provide compute funding for some projects, and you can apply for it as part of the mentor application.

Yes, we allow mentors to team up to run SPAR projects together!

Yes! As long as you have the capacity to meet the level of involvement you commit to in each of your project proposals, you can run as many SPAR projects as you like.

While expectations will differ greatly depending on the proposed project and mentor, generally we expect mentors to:

• Have weekly meetings with project team. It'll be up to your team to coordinate meeting times or create co-working systems.

• Have weekly or biweekly meetings with mentees individually. The format of check-ins will depend on your preferences.

• Communicate with mentees regularly through some accessible platform of your choice (e.g., Slack, Discord, Signal, Whatsapp, etc.)

• Have some task management system set up to keep track of what everyone needs to do.

Each project can have as few as 1 mentee.

There is no strict upper bound on team size. However, it is an important goal of SPAR to provide quality mentorship and learning opportunities to mentees. We ask in the project proposal for mentors to commit to a certain level of involvement, and we recommend against taking on too many mentees to realistically meet that level of involvement.

SPAR project proposals are zero-commitment until mentees are accepted. You can always choose to reject all applicants and cancel the project.

Try to be communicative and transparent with their project groups. We understand that issues and emergencies come up, just try to communicate them ASAP with project groups.

Provide constructive and friendly feedback when necessary.

Please use the Slack workspace respectfully. Try to be kind and use appropriate language when communicating with others in the workspace. Be thoughtful about what you post in the chat, and avoid sending irrelevant messages, advertisements, or excessive self-promotion.