Hey everyone,
We’re coming up on the 2-year anniversary of the founding of Atlas (in October), and that seems like a good time to double-down on the things we think we’ve been doing well.
If we reflect on the past successes of Atlas, some of our biggest impacts have been
helping organize the GSAI summit
recruiting and supporting Jason Gross to do the experiments that became the foundation and impetus for Theorem Labs
helping build and guide the nascent flexHEG community, mentoring projects and building teams, including bringing in Mehmet Sencan to develop commercial tamper response mechanisms.
I wrote about this in my Q3 update, but I’m now 50% time at Convergent Research to create two FROs* that reduce risks from AI. One of those efforts will be focused on tools to validate formal specifications, continuing our work on an IDE for formal specifications, and the other will focus on building useful hardware for AI compute governance. That frees up Atlas Computing to look upstream of FRO creation and identify what teams or projects should exist to start addressing neglected potential catastrophic risks from AI.
Our first step is talking to experts and making a list. Once we have that list, we'll share it with all of you here.
After that, we'll start refining our understanding of the problems, identifying potential solutions, relevant experts, potential supporters, and interested stakeholders before gift-wrapping these and hunting for founders.
We hold a somewhat contrarian intake that the “generalist founder archetype” isn’t a binary characteristic, and we can lower the barrier to entry for creating an organization to address these risks IF the potential directly-responsible individual is provided the right problem, relevant context, initial milestones, stakeholders, and advisors. I’d claim that we demonstrated this with Mehmet Sencan and Jason Gross, neither of whom were founders before joining Atlas.
I hope we can reproduce this model and look forward to sharing our learnings with you as we try! (And even if we’re wrong, hopefully the list we make provides some useful starting points for others.)
*for those who don’t know, a Focused Research Organization (FRO) is a tightly scoped, time-bound initiatives (typically ~5 years) that pursue ambitious technical milestones (like large datasets, next-gen tools, or open protocols) through startup-style execution by teams of about 10–30 full-time employees. Their mission is to create and deploy high-impact public goods into the world, via open-sourcing, partnerships, or spinouts, rather than pursuing open-ended research. More here: https://www.convergentresearch.org/about-fros