About
Principles of Intelligence is a non-profit research organization aiming to grow the AI Safety field by fostering interdisciplinary engagement with the natural and social sciences.
Our mission is to support the advancement of foundational scientific contributions which would aid in the development of safe and globally beneficial AI systems.
History
PIBBSS was founded in 2022 by Nora Ammann, TJ, and Anna Gajdova, aiming to solve a problem of epistemic access – we could learn about the intelligence of future AI by projecting from current AI, theoretizing about future AI, or by looking at intelligence “in the wild.” PIBBSS was aiming to bring in insights from intelligence in the wild by bringing researchers from a variety of disciplines and having them work on AI Risks. PIBBSS Fellowship, uniquely, focused on finding most brilliant candidates, and then finding them best possible mentors, rather than finding candidates which suit existing mentors; thus we have helped bring in people more diverse than usual, and more willing to start their own research agendas rather than follow their mentors’ footsteps. It was organized in the Czech Republic for the first and second year, after which it moved to London and then San Francisco, following where the best locations for Fellows that year.
Over the years, the aim of the Fellowship has moved, both due to new insights from running the fellowship and due to a changing landscape of institutions. We now find ourselves as one of the very few institutional homes working with niche ideas, allowing us to pioneer blue sky research, and think about the theory of the science of AI (should we aim for a Big Science of AIS, what is the balance between theory and application in AIS, etc).
As we were able to be more ambitious and work with more senior researchers, we have expanded into Horizon Scanning (proactively seeking new fields to integrate into AIS rather than waiting for researchers to apply) and Affiliate program (giving 6-12 months of funding to researchers to develop their ideas from concept to prototype, before spinning of their research into a new organization). With the new growth, we renamed and rebranded the umbrella organization to Principles of Intelligence, now established in the US, and hosting not just the PIBBSS Fellowship but also the Iliad research group. In the future, we hope to become an institutional home for many research threads that benefit from each other, and serve as a hub for the creation of the Big Science of AI Safety, a “Bell Labs of AIS”.
Principles of Intelligence aims to understand the underlying principles that govern intelligent behaviour — across systems, scales and substrates — to ensure safer AI futures
Our Mission
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) presents both unprecedented opportunities and potential risks to humanity. As AI systems become more sophisticated and integrated into various aspects of our lives, ensuring their safe development and deployment becomes of paramount importance.
However, developing rigorous safety guarantees requires substantial scientific advances in our understanding of AI systems and their impacts. Unlike current day engineering practices for physical systems, the development and deployment of AI systems is not grounded in a mature science from which their safety properties can be rigorously deduced. Furthermore, as AI systems become deeply integrated into society, they will have complex and far-reaching impacts across multiple domains: from psychological effects of cognitive offloading, to economic disruptions from labor automation, to profound sociological and political shifts. Just as the development of safe vaccines required insights from immunology, microbiology, and epidemiology, we need a new interdisciplinary science that combines diverse fields to ensure the safety and efficacy of AI systems.
Our mission is to catalyze this interdisciplinary maturation of AI Safety by hosting an ecosystem of research residency programs as well as field building events.
We have built a robust network and reputation for providing exceptional support to our community. Alumni from our research residency programs consistently praise the level of support they receive, often noting it surpasses their previous experiences in traditional academic settings. We’re unique in our ability to successfully attract senior academic talent, offering them opportunities to leverage their expertise in ways that many talent interventions, typically focused on early-career researchers, cannot accommodate. Lastly, our track record of ‘making good bets’ is evidenced by the endorsement from the community, as well as the success of our alumni, who have gone on to found their own organizations (i.e. Simplex) and secure safety positions in top labs such as Anthropic and Epoch, or work for the UK AI Security Institute.