EA - Announcing Arcadia Impact by Joe Hardie

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing Arcadia Impact, published by Joe Hardie on January 5, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Arcadia Impact is a non-profit organisation that enables individuals in London to use their careers to tackle the world's most pressing problems. We have existed for over a year as London EA Hub (LEAH) and we recently rebranded as an organisation to Arcadia Impact.Our current projects:Effective Altruism Group SupportSafe AI LondonLEAH Coworking SpaceEA Group SupportWe support EA groups atImperial,UCL,KCL, andLSE[1] which includes mentoring student organisers, encouraging collaboration between groups, and running events such as retreats.All four universities are ranked in the top 50 globally, with over 114,000 students collectively, presenting significant potential to build capacity to address pressing global problems. London offers a unique concentration of highly talented students, and therefore an exciting opportunity for EA groups to benefit from collaboration and coordination. Additionally, London is the world's largest EA hub, with an extensive network of professionals working on various causes. Despite this London university groups have historically lacked consistent organiser capacity relative to comparable universities.Since we were founded last year, the groups have reached hundreds of students, with over 200 applying to reading groups. Students who joined our programmes have started full-time roles, attended research programmes, or continued studying with the goal of contributing to a range of EA cause areas. Given the size and potential of the universities, we think there is still significant room to expand and improve our work.Safe AI LondonWe support AI Safety field building activities with Safe AI London (SAIL) supporting individuals in London to find careers that reduce risks from advanced artificial intelligence.We do this by:Running targeted outreach to technical courses at Imperial and UCL due to theconcentration of talent on Computer Science and related courses.Educating people on the alignment problem, throughtechnical andgovernance reading groups and speaker events.Up-skilling people on machine learning through upskilling programmes or by encouraging them to apply to programmes such asARENA.Allowing them to test their fit for research throughMARS London,research sprints, and connecting them to other research opportunities such asMATS.Creating a community of people in London and connecting people to opportunities within the field through socials and retreats.London is Europe's largest hub for AI talent and is becoming an increasingly relevant location for AI safety, with Google DeepMind, Anthropic and OpenAI opening offices here, and AI Safety researchers at MATS, Conjecture, and Center on Longterm Risk. The UK Government has also launched theAI Safety Institute which is working on AI Safety Research within the UK government.AI Safety university groups have shownpromising results over the last year and London universities have a unique concentration of talented students relevant to AI safety with Imperial and UCL ranked in the top 25 universities for computer science courses globally.LEAH Coworking SpaceThe LEAH Coworking Space is an office space in central London used by professionals and students working on impactful projects. The office aims to provide value from:Improving the productivity of professionals doing impactful work. In our most recent user survey, users reported an average of 6.3 additional productive hours per week from using the space.Causing impactful connections and interactions between users.Various situations where we offer assistance to the wider community:Allowing other organisations to use the space for events.Enabling in-person meetings and coworking for remote organisations.We also ...