The full weekend — what we read, what we build, who joins us, and how the sixteen spots get filled.
A conference fills a room for a day and empties it by dinner. A weekend does something a day can't: it gives people enough time to move past introductions, disagree properly, and leave with the four or five people they'll keep working with. We'd rather start a network with sixteen committed people than a hundred who came once.
Everything is covered — lodging, meals, and travel from anywhere in the region. Cost shouldn't decide who gets to be in the room.
Not tracks you pick between — threads that run through the whole weekend. You'll sit in both.
The institutional, political, and social side of advanced-AI risk — and how society can actually reduce catastrophic outcomes.
Concrete, safety-relevant work — the tools and experiments people use to understand and constrain model behavior.
Undergrads, grad students, researchers, and builders anywhere in Central and Western New York — in CS, policy, philosophy, biology, law, or anything adjacent. No prior AI safety background is required, and we mean that: some of the best people in the room will be encountering this properly for the first time.
What we're actually selecting for is whether you'll still be engaged in six months. Spots are limited, so the application asks you to think a little — it takes about fifteen minutes. Applications close Friday, October 16.
The retreat is the start, not the whole thing — campus talks, hub meetups, reading groups, and a larger regional event in the spring. Most of it gets planned in our Slack, alongside people from every campus in the network.
You don't need to be coming to the retreat to join. If you're anywhere in Central or Western New York and this is interesting to you, come say hello.
Applications close Friday, October 16 and take about fifteen minutes. We read every one and get back to everybody — accepted or not — with the confirmed location and full details.