AI Safety Initiative at Georgia Tech (AISI)

The AI Safety Initiative at Georgia Tech (AISI) is a student-led organization focused on ensuring artificial intelligence is developed to the benefit of humanity. Founded in 2022, AISI operates at the intersection of technical AI safety research, AI governance, and field-building within the Georgia Tech community in Atlanta. AISI's educational pipeline is designed to make AI safety research approachable and well-supported. Their flagship program is an introductory AI safety fellowship distilled from BlueDot Impact's AGI Safety Fundamentals course, running six-week cohorts of 6-8 students each. The program has attracted over 160 applications in a single year and over 90% of AISI's current organizers and engaged members are past fellows. For participants seeking deeper technical skills, AISI runs Rapid Upskilling Cohorts based on the ARENA curriculum, using PyTorch to build practical ML engineering competence. Select fellows are invited to join capstone research projects aimed at arXiv or workshop publication. The organization has hosted AI safety tracks at Georgia Tech's flagship AI hackathon, AI ATL, with support from Anthropic and Apart Research as sponsors. AISI also launched an inaugural AI policy hackathon in collaboration with Apart Research, covering tracks including International Cooperation, Deployment and Application Regulation, and Training Data Privacy and Copyright. AISI provides free consultation services for labs, academic departments, and PhD and MS students seeking context about AI safety, help generating compelling research projects, connections to relevant AI safety funding, and support writing grant proposals. Researchers from Georgia Tech and GTRI have also piloted in-depth crisis simulations exploring national security implications of advanced AI, designed by AISI in collaboration with Model UN at Georgia Tech. The group's membership is approximately 50% undergraduates, 45% graduate students and PhDs, and 5% working professionals. Co-director Yixiong Hao conducts research on activation engineering, interpretability, and LLM safety. AISI is recognized as an official registered student organization at Georgia Tech and can be reached at board@aisi.dev.