Growing together: EA Hungary and AI Safety Hungary combined report for 2024

By Milan_A, gergo, AIS Hungary, EA Hungary @ 2025-07-29T14:15 (+25)

Note 1: most of our operations at EA and AI Safety Hungary are still overlapping, so we figured that a shared report is more suitable to avoid unnecessary repetition.

Note 2: since our previous reports were covering EA and AIS Hungary’s progress until August 2023, this report will mention our activities in 2023 Fall as well as the whole of 2024.

Executive Summaries

EA Hungary

• Throughout 2024, our scope aimed to cover the whole country.
• We continued with our monthly newsletter - the mailing list has grown from ~178 to ~426 contacts between Oct 2023 - Jan 2025.
• We held a total of 4 rounds of courses, using the EA Handbook and a weekly session format.
• Our course marketing, boosted by paid social media ads, has been attracting an increased number of applicants, and, combined with participants from other sources, we had a total of 68 people who finished at least 4 sessions in our introductory courses this period.
• We launched a new marketing organisation called Amplify, aiming to help EA/AIS field-building orgs by setting up paid social media ad campaigns for their programs. Amplify has supported about ~40 organisations between its start in September 2024 - January 2025 (we will publish a separate report on their progress soon)
• We changed our website thanks to a template from EA Finland, also prepared an open template for everyone that you can find here.

AIS Hungary

• We decided to expand the scope of our courses to include the whole country in early 2024, and consequently rebranded as AI Safety Hungary from Budapest AI Safety.
• We launched our own newsletter in October 2023 - the mailing list has grown from ~140 to ~530 contacts since the start.
• We held a total of 4 rounds of courses, combining the weekly session format with 1-week intensive program, where a total of 113 people completed at least 4 sessions of the program.
• We continued to use paid social media ads in our course marketing.
• We explored replacing our intro curriculum from the Bluedot course to CAIS’s AI Safety, Ethics and Society course, but ultimately decided against it.
• In collaboration with AIS Global Society, our team is taking part in creating an online version of the ARENA course.
• Since last summer, we have started experimenting with joining other groups in coordinating our course. Together with the European Network for AI Safety, we have facilitated the starting of AI Safety Dublin. Our operations team also plans to support AIS Collab throughout 2025 in the upcoming iterations of their course.
• We have made a visualisation of our Theory of Change. All of our activities have the aim of helping people to upskill and transition to full-time AI Safety roles. To date, most of our impact has come from supporting a small number of highly talented individuals to transition into such roles.
• We revamped our website with help from other groups and published an open template for everyone that you can find here (since then we also published an institutional-themed website template).

Our Theory of Change

All of our activities have the aim of helping people to upskill and transition to full-time EA and AI Safety roles. To date, most of our impact has come from supporting a small number of highly talented individuals to transition into such roles, as well as spinning out or contributing to international fieldbuilding initiatives.

How to read this post

At each section, we provide separate information about EA and AIS Hungary’s work only where there was a meaningful difference (e.g., courses, current staff, etc.). Where such a distinction is not clarified, the discussion applies to both orgs’ processes.

If you are interested in a broader overview of the groups’ progress over the period, just continue reading after this section (Progress overview).

If you are more interested in specific details and outcomes of our projects, you can find that information at the Appendix below.

Lastly, if you want to learn about a more abstract level CB strategy, we recommend you to follow The Field Building Blog, written by EA and AIS Hungary’s founder, Gergő.

Progress overview

Our groups’ structures

• We see a considerable overlap between the two communities - for instance, several course participants at EA Hungary also did at least one track of the AIS Intro course and vice versa.
• Since late 2023, we have been expanding our course promotion to cover the whole country, but we still find that most new community members are based in Budapest (likely due to the high population density in the area).

Courses - structure and short-term outcomes

EA Hungary

• We ran 4 rounds of our EA introductory courses using the EA Handbook for curriculum, and 2 instances of the in-depth program. We also piloted a Biosecurity course in our community, but it ceased after most people dropped out due to issues with availability.

• The EA intro courses took place in the structure of our split regular program^[1].

• Starting with the 2024 Spring round, we have decided to move all of our courses to be run online only, but we still organised in-person meetups in Budapest.
  • A main reason for this was to reduce operations (and room-booking) costs in our courses, and to facilitate the participation of people based in the countryside as well (there are some good universities e.g. in Debrecen, Pécs, or Szeged).
  • We also didn’t experience a significant drop in commitment to the course because of this: completion rates used to be relatively similar between in-person and online formats in the previous rounds.
  • We think it’s likely that people feel less part of the community if they participate in online courses, as opposed to in-person ones. This is a trade-off that we are willing to make due to the money and time saved on running courses online, which we can use to scale the course. Our main focus is making sure to follow up with highly motivated participants to help them integrate into the community.
• Starting in the 2024 Fall round, we decided to deprioritise in-depth courses, mainly because of the smaller demand and returns compared to the amount of time needed to organise them.

AIS Hungary

• From 2023 Fall until the end of 2024, we ran AGI Safety Fundamentals Courses in 4 rounds (2023 Fall, 2024 Spring, 2024 Summer, 2024 Fall), combining our split regular program^[2] and intensive course^[3]. We offered two tracks (technical and policy), for which we used syllabi built on Bluedot’s multi-week programs (original course links are unavailable atm).

• We have been mostly using “in-session reading” format (participants could go through the texts during the meetings) to make the course more accessible for people with limited time.
• Similarly to EA Hungary, we moved to online courses only and shortened our application form (see discussion above).

• In the 2024 Spring period, we also successfully^[4] ran an advanced program, the: Alignment 201 (technical) course based on Bluedot’s program^[5]. Based on anecdotal feedback, participants found attending the course valuable, but they felt that it is somewhat outdated and overly theoretical.

EA Hungary course data:

AIS Hungary course data:

Feedback forms

EA Hungary

• According to our course feedback forms, on a scale of 1-10, the expressed likelihood of recommending our course to a friend, classmate, or colleague was an average of 9.1 over the period.
• The average feeling of involvement with the community was 8.0 over the period.

AIS Hungary

• According to our course feedback forms, on a scale of 1-10, the expressed likelihood of recommending our course to a friend, classmate, or colleague was an average of 9.1 over the period.
• The average feeling of involvement with the community was 7.7 over the period.

Paid social media ads, launching Amplify

Since 2023, we have been experimenting at both EA and AIS Hungary with paid social media ads to boost our course promotion efforts.

• The costs of a single campaign (i.e., one “experiment”) were initially relatively low (we started with budgets below 250 USD).
• We had enough facilitators to support a larger number of participants.
• The ads could reach a significantly larger audience than our previous promotion methods, counterfactually attracting additional people who could have high-impact career prospects.
• Over the period, 22 course participants at EA Hungary and 23 course participants at AIS Hungary, who were later labelled promising by the facilitators, came in through these paid social media ads.

In the fall of 2024, following our successes with social media ads, our staff members launched Amplify, a marketing agency. This new organisation aims to support EA and AIS fieldbuilding effort by setting up social media ads for clients internationally. We will share a separate forum post on Amplify’s progress later.

Newsletter

• We launched the monthly EA Hungary Newsletter and AIS Hungary Newsletter in 2023 Fall, and continued to do this over 2024. We find them to be a low-cost way to update community members about upcoming events, job/volunteering opportunities, and recently released readings in the field.
• As shown in the tables below, the mailing lists have been consistently expanding.

EA Hungary Newsletter data:

AIS Hungary Newsletter data:

• We saw a more or less gradual decrease in opening and clicking rates, but a faster increase in recipients meant that the number of monthly openers and clickers went up. Our main aim is to engage more people over time, so overall we find this change in engagement a positive result.
  • We believe this could be largely explained by the high number of Leads from course advertising (see above): people who expressed their interest in the ads’ built-in forms also consented to receiving emails. However, some of these leads don’t end up joining the course and consequently do not read the newsletter.
• Most of the increase in recipients usually came from our intro course rounds. By the first half of 2024, we ran 2 rounds of AGISF (2023 Fall and 2024 Spring), while we ran 2 rounds in the second half (2024 Summer and Fall), hence the more significant jump in that last period.

Events, meetups, retreats, coworking

• We have temporarily reduced our focus on social events after our monthly meetup in 2023 December. This was because the repeatedly low attendance rates suggested to us that it is not an effective spend of our fieldbuilding time, and we decided to focus more on our courses and partnerships.
  • Later, thanks to an increase in our team’s capacity, we decided to hold a summer social in 2024 August (~14 attendees), and moved back to having ~monthly meetups from November (11 attendees).
  • Starting from early 2024, we organised weekly in-person coworking sessions open to the community, as well as online coworking sessions starting 2024 Fall. These sessions are mostly attended by our core staff, and we find this to be a sufficient reason to organise them. Ideally, we would have the capacity to send personal invites for people to attend, but this is something we haven’t been able to do to this point.
  • In addition to our courses, there has been a self-organised reading group for the book Nexus, where ~6-8 members of the EA/AIS community participated.
  • AIS Hungary experimented with an online meetup for the national community in December (~15 participants), and it worked out well relative to time spent on organising, so we may do this again in the future.

Partnerships

• Similar to previous years, we continued to have cooperations with academic dormitories (“szakkollégiumok”).
  • EA Hungary outcomes
    • We ran two courses with them, with a total of ~3-4 people participating.
      • Most of the applicants showed low interest in the program, and joined mainly for credits at their organisations, which could mostly explain the low participation rate (~2 per course). Coordination with the dormitories before the start of the course was relatively easy, however, in view of the participation rates, it is still likely not worth it to pursue this further.
  • AIS Hungary outcomes
    • Similarly, we ran two courses with them, resulting in 11 additional people who have participated in our course. We later deprioritised these collaborations (similar reasoning to EA Hungary).
    • Apart from doing the courses, we had the chance to give two lectures on AI Safety. We found that these were not a good use of our time, due to communication issues with the organisers, low attendance and poor signup rates to our courses afterwards, which we would see as the main value of giving such lectures.
• Both EA and AIS Hungary joined GiLE and several youth organisations in a collaboration called Changemakers Network. Through these partnerships, we had the chance to give presentations about EA and AI Safety, promote our courses in a larger network, and organise an ideathon on AI policy. We think that the participation in this network was overall worthwhile, but in retrospect, committing to co-organising the policy hackathon was not the most effective use of our time, as it was challenging to keep the discussions on AI Safety high fidelity in this context.

From the Fall of 2024, we decided to deprioritise in-person talks/lectures because the reach and consequent sign-up rate is relatively low compared to the time spent on them. We may organise hybrid or online events in the future as there is more potential for scaling them up and reaching a larger audience, which can likely justify their low course-signup rates.

Conferences

• See the table below for our communities’ attendance at EAG(x) conferences. Please note that there is still a great overlap between the communities of EA and AIS Hungary, and the numbers below show the combined attendance of these two groups.
• At most conferences, we also managed to get in touch with Hungarians outside our network who found out about the events, but since then have been added to our channels.

Strategy meetings

Both orgs have been holding strategy meetings every two-three weeks with our core staff and supporting volunteers, about 3-6 attendees per session. These meetings helped to keep everyone updated about ongoing projects and allow us to discuss and refine our strategy over time.

Funding, hiring, staff and supporting members

EA Hungary

• Sources of funding
  • Staff salaries funded by EA Infrastructure Fund
  • Group support costs funded by CEA
• Staff
  • In the Fall of 2023, our paid staff consisted of a Director, Gergő, and an Operations Lead, Milán. Over the period, Gergő moved to a lower-capacity Strategic Advisor role, was replaced by Milán, and two people joined the operations team, Lili in 2024 March and Dénes in 2024 November. Our staff’s combined work hours over the year changed as follows:
    • At the end of 2023/beginning of 2024, the staff consisted of 2 members, working a sum of 35 hours/week (~0.88 FTE) on EA Hungary. From February 2024, a new operations person joined the team, increasing the total work time of the team to 40 hours/week (1 FTE). In the Fall of 2024, after one more hiring period (operations role) and some additional changes in staff capacity, we now have a team of 4 with ~45 hours/week (~1.13 FTE).
      • Note: the 4 staff members also contribute to AIS Hungary projects, which explains why 45 hours are divided between them. Everyone from this team contributes to AIS Hungary as well, meaning that each staff member is doing at least 0.5 FTE - those work hours are not included in these numbers.
• Volunteers and interns
  • In the Fall of 2023, we identified two promising students at Budapest University of Technology and Economics who we were hoping to support in starting an EA university group. They organised an intro course with 8 participants, and took part in the OSP program as well. Unfortunately, the group went dormant afterwards.
  • We had a similar attempt of supporting two motivated students at the University of Pécs, but as these organisers moved away in the upcoming semester, the group didn’t last longer than one semester.
  • In the Spring and Summer of 2024, we had an intern set up a system for analysing the effectiveness of the paid social media ads that we had been using to promote our introductory courses. Their work later helped us set up a similar system for the newly launched marketing org, Amplify.
  • In the Spring of 2024, we had an intern, and in the Summer of 2024, a volunteer helping us out with our social media appearance. They were promising, but unfortunately, they both had to stop supporting us because of their studies. One of them indicated their interest in getting back to us in the future, so we’re hoping to reconnect with them soon.
    • These volunteers had been mostly managed by Milán and Lili.
  • In our Introductory program, most of the mentors were volunteers. They were usually previous participants who showed a good understanding of the topic and motivation to be more engaged in the community.

AIS Hungary

• Sources of funding
  • Staff salaries funded by EA Funds
  • Group support costs funded by Open Philanthropy
• Staff
  • In the Fall of 2023, our paid staff consisted of a Director (Gergő), a Technical Lead (Melinda), a Policy Lead (Kambar), and an Operations Lead (Milán). Over the period, there has been a change in our Technical Lead, and Lili and Dénes joined the operations team. All of our staff is working part time,  our combined work hours over the year changed as follows:
    • At the end of 2023/beginning of 2024, the staff consisted of 4 members, working a sum of 70 hours/week (~1.75 FTE) on AI Safety Hungary. From February 2024, a new operations person joined the team, increasing the total work time of the team to 80 hours/week (2 FTE). In the Fall of 2024, after one more hiring period (operations role) and some additional changes in staff capacity, we had a team of 5 with ~86 hours/week (~2.18 FTE).
• Volunteers and interns
  • In the Spring of 2024, we had an intern helping us out with our social media appearance. They did a great job, but unfortunately, we failed to set up a sustainable system of posting and we have been relatively inactive since they stopped supporting us. We have been experimenting with other volunteers since then, and are still looking for someone who could help us with it.
  • Similar to EA Hungary, facilitation in our Intro and Advanced programs was covered mostly by volunteers
  • Some of our current volunteers are helping out in the development of the CAIS and ARENA curricula (see above in the Courses section).

On career advice

In addition to our courses, as it is mentioned also in our ToC, we are also responsible for providing career support to promising community members who are motivated to work in an impactful position in AIS and EA. Unfortunately, we weren’t consistent in doing this over the period, partly because we didn’t have enough time and reached out with some delay. We aim to improve on this by having course coordinators connect promising participants with our career advisors right after the course ends.

Next steps for EA Hungary

• Similarly to AIS Collab’s work we plan to experiment with an international EA course coordination between local groups whereby we hope to reduce operations costs for organisers and help them grow their communities more effectively. We started reaching out to potential collaborators in December, 2024, aiming to start the program in February, 2025.
• With the recent growth of our operations capacity (having hired a new staff member in November 2024), we plan to bring back monthly meetups, and generally rethink how our capacity would be applied best for supporting promising students and professionals on their path towards a high-impact career.

Next steps for AIS Hungary

• Following our successful course collaboration with AIS Dublin and AIS Global Society, we are now planning to participate in a similar joint coordination with more organisations by working with AIS Collab.

Concluding thoughts

We are overall happy about the progress we made over the past year. Our course promotion efforts have been improving considerably, and our international course coordination projects (AIS Collab and Scaling Altruism) seem to be a promising direction to increase our impact. In 2025, we hope to further develop both our local community building efforts and our influence on the international EA and AIS infrastructure.

Most importantly, we helped a small number of highly talented individuals move into EA and AIS roles, which is the most important outcome we are trying to achieve.

Acknowledgments

Huge thanks to everyone who’s helped us along the way. We’re especially grateful to Catherine Low for helping Gergő kick off EA Hungary in its first year, and to CEA for providing the fieldbuilding infrastructure and group support funding then and onwards. We also really appreciate EAIF for their salary support and Open Philanthropy for giving group support funding to AIS Hungary.

Lastly, we don’t want to miss mentioning our amazing volunteers - this wouldn’t be possible without their time, energy, and commitment - and our community members who engage with our ideas and share our aim of making a positive difference.

Footnotes

1. ^{^}

    See this previous post on splitting your 8-week programs in half.

2. ^{^}

    See this previous post on splitting your 8-week programs in half.

3. ^{^}

    See more on running 2 courses in one round here.

4. ^{^}

    Note: this was preceded by an unsuccessful attempt during 2023 Fall.

5. ^{^}

    At the time of writing this report, the curriculum was not available on Bluedot's website anymore.

6. ^{^}

    See this previous post on splitting your 8-week programs in half.

7. ^{^}

    See more on running 2 courses in one round here.

8. ^{^}

    Note: this was preceded by an unsuccessful attempt during 2023 Fall.

9. ^{^}

    At the time of writing this report, the curriculum was not available on Bluedot's website anymore.

10. ^{^}

     In this round, in addition to collecting direct sign-ups from ads, we also used a format where people were directly sent to our website. In this specific campaign, we couldn't collect reliable data on the number of people coming from the ads, so the number only represents the Leads signing up through our former ad format. See the "Social media marketing" subsection for more on ads.

11. ^{^}

     See this previous post on splitting your 8-week programs in half.

12. ^{^}

     Leads are a characteristic of our most recent ad format. After clicking on the ad, the person is directed to a quick form where they could share their name and email, whereby we can follow up with them with a reminder to complete their application. The number of leads corresponds to the number of quick form submissions.

Appendix - additional details

EA Hungary

Events, meetups, retreats, coworkings

• 2023 Fall
  • 1 social event per month with an average of 10 attendees
  • Biweekly coworkings
• 2024 Spring
  • Biweekly coworkings
• 2024 Summer
  • Serbia retreat (Romania, HU): 7 joined from EA Hungary
  • EAGxBerlin sign-up event, 5 attendees
  • Pécs meetup, 10-15 attendees
• 2024 Fall
  • EA meetup organised with the Pécs Psychology Student Association, 15 attendees
  • self-organised book club - Nexus
  • meetups restarted
    • October meetup, 7 attendees
    • November, 6 attendees
    • Christmas social (together with AIS), 15 attendees

Partnerships

• 2023 Fall
  • Dormitories: 2 collaborations with 2 intro courses organised, 4 people finished session 4
• 2024 Spring
  • Changemakers Network
    • Presentation on EA and cause prioritisation to ~40 people
• 2024 Fall
  • Changemakers network faded away kind of
    • not sure to what extent should this be mentioned
  • 2 dorms: courses (1 cancelled)
    • 3 people completed session 4
    • not everyone was there because because of interest or value alignment
  • Pécs Psychology Student Association: 1 event with 15 attendees

Staff, interns

• 2024 Fall
  • new ops team member (Milán)
• 2024 Spring
  • new ops team member (Milán)
  • new marketing intern (Janice)
  • +1 upskilling grant (Merell
• 2024 Fall
  • change in director (Milán)
  • new ops person (Dénes)

Amplify

• 2024 Spring - Summer
  • preparations
• 2024 Fall onwards
  • ~20 clients (until January 2025)
  • new senior marketer (Paul)
  • data analysis volunteer (Dennis)

AIS Hungary

Events, meetups

• 2023 Fall
  • 3 meetups with 5-10 attendees each
• 2024 Summer
  • Summer social (August)
    • 22 sign-ups, 14 attendees
• 2024 Fall
  • 2 in-person meetups
    • November: 20 sign-ups, 11 attendees
    • December (with EA HU): 29 sign-ups, 12 attendees (combined)
  • 1 online meetup (December)
    • 31 sign-ups, ~15 attendees
  • Nexus reading groups
    • ~8 participants

Partnerships

• 2023 Fall
  • Academic dorms
    • 3 in-person intro courses run with them
  • Budapest University of Technology and Economics
    • 2 guest lectures
      • Relatively few (<10) newsletter sign-ups per talk
  • GiLE
    • 1 presentation at an AI Hackathon
      • 4 sign-ups
• 2024 Spring
  • Changemakers Network
    • Connected with 25 local youth organisations
    • 4 meetups, mostly just mailing list sign-ups
  • AI Governance Hackathon by Alignment Jam (Changemakers Network)
    • 20 sign-ups, 12 participants completed
• 2024 Summer
  • AIS Dublin
    • Course coordination (see above)
• 2024 Fall
  • AIS Dublin and AIS Global Society
    • Course coordination (see above)

Staff, interns, and volunteers

• 2023 Fall
  • new Policy Lead with ~0.3 FTE
  • new Operations lead with ~0.9 FTE
  • 3 volunteer mentors
• 2024 Winter-Spring
  • new Technical Lead with ~0.25 FTE
  • new Operations Officer with 0.5 FTE
  • 1 social media intern
• 2024 Summer
  • 1 social media volunteer
  • 8 volunteer mentors (including those from AIS Dublin and AIS GS)
• 2024 Fall
  • New Operations Officer with 0.5 FTE
  • 10 volunteer course mentors (including those from AIS Dublin and AIS GS)