Attend SPAR's virtual demo day! (career fair + talks)

By Agustín Covarrubias 🔸, Helena Tran @ 2025-05-02T23:45 (+17)

This is a linkpost to https://demoday.sparai.org/

Summary: SPAR is hosting its Demo Day on May 11th, 2025, featuring 45+ AI safety research projects from mentees across technical and governance domains. This event is open to the public and welcomes everyone interested in AI safety. The virtual event includes poster sessions, lightning talks, and a career fair with AI safety organizations like METR, MATS, Constellation, Goodfire, and many others.

What is SPAR?

The Supervised Program for Alignment Research (SPAR) has grown to become the largest online mentorship program focused on AI safety research. Over the past three months, more than 160 researchers—many early in their careers—have worked on technical and governance projects under the guidance of mentors from organizations including Redwood Research, MIRI, Goodfire, Convergence Analysis, and other independent alignment researchers.

Demo Day Details

When: Sunday, May 11th, 2025.
Time: 10am–2:30pm PT / 1–5:30pm ET / 5–9:30pm UTC.
Where: EA Gather Town (virtual).
Who: Open to everyone! Both established researchers and newcomers welcome.

Schedule:

This year's career fair will feature organizations at the forefront of AI safety research and field-building, including METR, MATS, Goodfire, Gray Swan, Constellation, Safe AI Forum, Arcadia Impact, Catalyze, and more. The career fair provides an excellent opportunity to learn about ongoing work and explore potential roles in both technical and governance domains.

What to Expect

This Demo Day will showcase 40+ projects spanning diverse areas, including:

Beyond the research presentations, Demo Day offers opportunities to:

Projects from this round include topics like “GPU side-channels for weight theft”, “Toy model of computation in superposition”, “Reviewing the State of Chinese Frontier AI Development”, and “Gradient routing.” You can view the complete list of projects on our website.

Why Attend?

Whether you're an established researcher, considering applying to SPAR in the future, or simply curious about the current landscape of AI safety research, Demo Day provides a low-friction way to engage with the people and projects shaping the field.

For those interested in AI safety careers, the career fair portion offers a unique chance to speak directly with prospective employers about both technical and governance opportunities.

This event is completely open to the public – you don't need any prior connection to SPAR or expertise in the field to attend. We welcome everyone interested in learning more about AI safety research!

Prizes

This year, we're excited to offer awards recognizing exceptional work:

Future SPAR Rounds

We'll be running another round of SPAR later this year. If you're interested in participating as either a mentor or mentee, you can register your interest here to receive updates about applications and deadlines.

RSVP

Ready to join us? RSVP at https://tally.so/r/nP4WlP to receive access details for the Gather Town space and to browse the list of featured projects and participating organizations.

Questions?

If you have any questions about Demo Day or the SPAR program, please reach out to us at spar@kairos-project.org or drop them in the comments below.

SPAR is a program of Kairos, an organization dedicated to accelerating talent to work in AI safety. Kairos supports programs like SPAR and FSP that equip emerging researchers to address technical and strategic challenges posed by advanced AI systems.

carmenmedina @ 2025-05-08T13:13 (+2)

Thanks a lot for making this happen! This is such an amazing way to make AIS knowledge and networks more accessible for people far from the established hubs and without the financial means to visit them. And at the same time, it also supports spreading the work of the SPAR mentees and helps them with their next steps.