EA - Celebrating 2023: 10 successes from the past year at CEEALAR by CEEALAR

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: Celebrating 2023: 10 successes from the past year at CEEALAR, published by CEEALAR on January 11, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Over the last couple of months we have written a series of posts making the case for the Centre for Enabling EA Learning and Research (CEEALAR) and asking for funding - seehere,here andhere. We are very grateful to those who supported us during the fundraiser, however we did not reach our target and still have a very short runway. Despite these current difficulties, we want to take a moment in this post to outline a few of our achievements from 2023. We are proud of what we have achieved, and looking forward to working hard in 2024 to ensure an impactful future for CEEALAR.Highlights of 2023We hostedALLFED's team retreat in which they gathered their full team to set out their theory of change and strategy.2. We also hostedOrthogonal, who launched their organisation and research agenda while here.3. We appointed two new trustees,Dušan D. Nešic andKyle Smith, and said goodbye to outgoing trusteesFlorent Berthet andSasha Cooper.Thank you to Florent and Sasha who have both been supporting CEEALAR since it began. We look forward to working withDušan and Kyle, and drawing on their expertise in talent management and fundraising.4. We updated ourTheory of Change to explicitly focus on work supporting global catastrophic risks.We believe this reflects the needs of the world, plus in recent months more than 95% of applicants have worked on GCRs.5. We launched the CEEALAR Alumni Network, CAN, and reconnected with our alumni to begin understanding the impact CEEALAR had on their lives.80% of respondents were working in EA, the majority of whom were doing AI safety work.6. We made substantial improvements to the building that helped boost grantee productivity.Including converting the attics into private studies, purchasing standing desks and creating a lounge area to relax.7. We improved our application form to ensure we get the very best grantees, and hosted a total of 60 grantees, more than any of the past 3 years.8. ~7.4% of our funding for 2023 came from guests and alumni, which we see as an endorsement - those closest to us believe we are an impactful option to donate to.A huge thank you to all of our donors.9. We launched a new website.Check it out here:www.ceealar.orgThank you to grantees Onicah and Bryce, pictured above, who helped us with the design and photos for the website.10. As always though, the achievements we want to celebrate most are those of our grantees.To name a few from 2023…Bryce received funding to manageAlignment Ecosystem Development, successfully transitioning from his previous career running a filmmaking business in to AI safetyNia and George launchedML4Good UK. Alongside running two UK camps, they are building infrastructure so ML4Good can expand to additional countries.Michele published a forum post onFree Agents, the culmination of his research into creating an AI that independently learns human valuesSeamus had a research paper accepted to theSocially Responsible Language Modelling Research (SoLaR) conference and is currently completingARENA Virtual.Sam was selected for theAI Futures Fellowship Program. While at CEEALAR he participated inAI Safety Hub's summer research program and co-authored a research paper accepted to aNeurIPS workshop.Eloise secured a place onAI Safety Camp, working alongside Nicky Pochinkov on the project "Modelling Trajectories of Language Models".In 2024 we are looking forward to running a targeted outreach campaign to reach high-quality grantees working on global catastrophic risks, hosting the first ML4Good UK bootcamp, and of course to fundraising and working on CEEALAR's financial sustainability.Once again, a heartfelt thank you to everyo...