OpenAI invited the 10 teams working on the Democratic Inputs to AI research project to meet at the OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco. The goal? To learn more about the various projects, and meet the people behind them.

In retrospect, it was a masterclass in how to kickstart a community.

1. A clear mission (democratic inputs to AI)

2. Enabling incentives (the grant)

3. Frequent check in’s (weekly calls)

4. Ever present, friendly and energised support (thanks Teddy, Tyna and Nathalie!)

5. Meeting in person at least once

6. Food!

7. A chance to unwind and make shared memories (thanks Karl!)

8. Embracing uncertainty

9. Making plans for the future

The Journey

We travelled to San Francisco with a team of 7: Pepijn & Lei (BMD) who work on the app development, Rolf (Drostan) who brings expertise on social deliberation, Rich (Sortition foundation) who is an expert in representative citizens sampling, Bram (JADS) who focusses on the Ethics, and Evelien & Jorim (Dembrane) representing the core of the consortium.

We got there a bit early. It looked calm, like a five star hotel. Friendly. And then we started to see the faces of people we had only seen online before.

I started talking to a fellow grantee. A guy from Kenya, we talked about his PhD research in language models. Nice! We dived into the deep end almost immediately. The second woman I talked to had been doing her post-doc research on DAO’s (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) for years. You can recognise the expertise!

Before long, the influx of new faces was too fast to keep track of. It was like the calm before the storm. Being there with such a large group, it felt like we belonged here.

The next couple hours flew by, filled with interesting conversations with all the different people coming from four different continents. Professional peacekeepers, successful entrepreneurs, academics from the most prestigious universities, democratic activists, journalists from a Nobel peace prize winning group news outlet, multiple OpenAI employees including one of the founders, and many more extremely knowledgeable, interesting, and kind people were present. All were connected via at least one common interest: exploring novel democratic processes in order to align AI and ensure a better AI-included future.

Everyone was so friendly, interested, eager and open to talk. We felt quite at ease and at home very quickly. After a delicious dinner, the jet lag forced us home fairly early with full heads. Jorim, Pepijn, Lei and Bram stayed up a little later, working on the presentation for the Frontier model forum.

A beautiful question came up during the workshops: Why are we doing this? Why are we building democratic processes. Andrew from Remesh had a wonderful answer. Paraphrasing slightly:

“I want humans to have agency in the future. How do you define that? How do you get there? Processes are needed. We have some already but we aren’t there yet. Not all humans have control right now. We would all agree that we would rather not have the problems such as homelessness or climate change, but we seem unable to fix it. We need better processes and tools!”

The many conversations have deepened our understanding of the subtle details of the tackled problem space, and provided overview of what is currently worked on or has already been done - in short - a lot!). We also connected with many smart, knowledgeable, and kind people that can help both our collective democratic projects. And finally, it has fueled us with plenty of inspiration to continue working on novel democratic processes in order to ensure an AI-aligned future. To misquote Abraham Lincoln: Aligned AI is artificial intelligence of the people, by the people and for the people.

Also, San Francisco is an amazing city, but that is something for another blog post. 🏝️

- written by Bram Delisse, Edited by Jorim Theuns