I am Leo Hyams, Founder and Executive Director of AI Safety South Africa. This is a capacity-building and research organisation based in Cape Town. Our capacity-building focus is on developing the top talent in Africa to contribute to the frontier of AI safety research. On this front, we recently hosted the Cooperative AI Research Fellowship at our hub in Cape Town. Our research focus is broadly on agent governance and we have worked closely with the UK AI Security Institute's Science of Evaluations team to develop novel methods for predicting agentic capabilities. We recently got general support funding to continue our hub building efforts for another two years. With this, we will be launching the Cape Institute for Safe AI (CISAI), which will include an AI safety co-working space and a multi-agent safety lab.
I'm broadly in this line of work because I think that AI will be radically transformative, that our societies are not prepared for these changes, and that there is a lot we can do to improve our future outcomes relating to this technology.
I'm doing this in Cape Town because:
- I grew up here and felt compelled to coordinate among my peer group.
- It's a beautiful, world-class city that is well situated to be a Schelling point for coordinating around AI risks and opportunities.
- I think that South African talent is phenomenal and underappreciated.
- The AI safety presence in Africa is minimal and by building this organisation I have been able to contribute something unique.
I'm interested in building physical hubs that are conducive to incredible innovations, such as the Bell Labs or the Santa Fe Institute. I'm also very attracted to the Solarpunk movement, and I believe that keeping Existential Hope in mind while working on catastrophic risk is essential for charting towards the right futures.
- Location
- Cape Town, though I travel a lot, especially to London.
- Recreation
- Mindfulness, exercise, reading, and the outdoors.
Currently Reading
Recently Read
“A couple great ideas but also a lot that was irrelevant. Biggest takeaways: don’t get into fights you can’t win decisively; if you’re going to fight, crush your enemy completely (interesting that he compared a well trained to a stone rolling down a hill: it is in its nature to destroy); warfare is primarily about deception (appear strong where you are weak, weak where you are strong); and that winning is as much understanding your environment as being skilled. The introduction is very long and boring. I skipped most of it.”
“Decent book. I like Brachs descriptions of her patients stories and she shares a lot of her own grapplings with spirituality in a very relatable way, and is very vulnerable at times. I can’t say I learnt much new about Buddhism but she describes the concepts and practices well. At times though it can feel a bit repetitive and I got a bit tired of it towards the end.”