“Georgia Tech AI Safety Initiative Retrospective 2025-2026” by Ishan Khire, yix, Andersehen, Alec Harris, Parv Mahajan, afterless, Eyas Ayesh, RocioPV, hersheys

Summary

• AY 2025-26 was an outlier year for Georgia Tech's AI Safety Initiative (AISI), with 15+ members placed in AI safety roles.  In this post, we distill our most important advice for other university groups.
• Key takeaways:
  • Deliberately identify potential talent in the fellowship, heavily invest high-context organizer time in great people.
  • 1:1s are probably your most neglected tool.
  • Being professional and punctual is underrated.

In this post, we'll share general lessons we've learned from organizing that can hopefully be applied to other AI safety groups. We're still running many of the same initiatives as before — fellowships, reading groups, research projects, and general meetings — but we think we've gotten higher quality members and had more organizational success compared to the previous academic year.

Since our last update, more than 15 members have been placed in paid fellowships & full-time roles. We’ve accepted 150+ people into our fellowships and grown to 50–100 active members.

Part 1: Activity Breakdown and Stats

Intro fellowships

Our intro fellowships continue to be our most impactful offering. They’re how we find talented, dedicated members. Our Spring acceptance rate was much higher than the Fall's due to a higher volume of [...]

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Outline:

(00:15) Summary

(01:26) Part 1: Activity Breakdown and Stats

(01:32) Intro fellowships

(04:15) Speaker Events

(05:03) Placements

(05:24) Other activities

(06:43) Part 2: Positions and Takes

(06:50) Build around exceptional people

(08:19) Have more 1:1s

(09:59) Professionalism is still underrated

(11:34) Leverage low-context organizers while helping them develop context

(12:29) Part 3: What We'd Do Differently

(12:34) Speaker Events

(13:16) Changes to the Fellowship

(13:58) Post-Fellowship Involvement

(15:20) Deprecated Rapid Upskilling Cohorts

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First published:
July 24th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DgLGD3A5CZXH7hbzP/georgia-tech-ai-safety-initiative-retrospective-2025-2026

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.