Conjecture and ARAYA hosted and organized the first Japan AI Alignment Conference in Tokyo, Japan on March 11 and 12. Details about the event can be found here. This event was generously supported by a grant from the Long Term Future Fund.
The goal of the conference was to illustrate the AI control problem to Japanese AI researchers, introduce them to current trends in AI alignment research, inspire new research directions, and to provide Western researchers exposure to a different set of AI safety thoughts from Japan. This was an exploratory event, and we plan to write a postmortem about the event in due time.
The first half of the conference was livestreamed. It featured an opening talk from Connor Leahy (CEO of Conjecture), a fireside chat between Ryota Kanai (CEO of ARAYA) and Jaan Tallinn, and some presentations on AI safety research directions in the West and in Japan. You can watch the first part of the conference which was livestreamed here.
The rest of the conference consisted of in-person small group workshops to discuss various AI alignment research directions. The conference had ~50 attendees from ARAYA, Conjecture, Whole Brain Architecture Initiative, MIRI, OpenAI, RIKEN, Ritsumeikan University, University of Tokyo, Omron Sinic X, Keio University, and others.
