UK launches £15 million AI alignment project
“Alignment is one of the most urgent technical challenges of our time,” the government said.
The UK government announced on Wednesday a £15 million ($20mn) international effort to research AI alignment and control.
The Alignment Project — led by the UK AI Security Institute and backed by the Canadian AI Safety Institute, Schmidt Sciences, AWS, Anthropic, and others — will fund “cutting-edge research into AI alignment” through grant funding, dedicated compute resources from AWS and Anthropic, and venture capital funding for “commercial alignment solutions.”
Its advisory board features Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio and Shafi Goldwasser, alongside OpenAI board member Zico Kolter.
Coming a week after the White House called for similar funding, the announcement is yet another endorsement of the legitimacy — and urgency — of solving the AI alignment problem.
The project, the government said, “reflects a growing global consensus … that alignment is one of the most urgent technical challenges of our time,” and that “solving alignment removes one of the largest barriers to AI adoption.” It will fund research into AI alignment, control, and interpretability.
UK tech secretary Peter Kyle noted that “advanced AI systems are already exceeding human performance in some areas,” arguing that the project would help ensure “the British public are protected from the most serious risks AI could pose as the technology becomes more and more advanced.”
UK AISI chief scientist Geoffrey Irving, meanwhile, said that “misaligned, highly capable systems could act in ways beyond our ability to control, with profound global implications,” adding that progress on AI alignment is “not happening fast enough relative to the rapid pace of AI development.”
The funding itself is also a meaningful addition to the ecosystem. According to a Transformer analysis, Open Philanthropy — the largest philanthropic funder in this space — funded around $12 million worth of technical alignment and oversight projects last year. (Disclosure: Open Philanthropy is also the primary funder of Transformer.)
However, the £15 million announced today pales in comparison to ARIA’s £59 million ($79mn) Safeguarded AI project, announced last year. ARIA is also part of the new Alignment Project coalition.