Advancements in AI bring both opportunities and serious risks. Atlas Computing takes on society-scale AI risks that no existing institution is built to address — we design the intervention, validate it with domain experts and funders, then recruit and empower the specialist who will own it.
You can think of us as:
We start from the opportunity or risk, map the context in which the need for interventions arise. Then we sketch possible interventions, iteratively working with experts to ensure feasibility and potential stakeholders to establish sufficiency to have the desired impact. Finally, we will make it as easy as possible for a career professional to take ownership over each interventions (we believe most of these efforts don't require risk-seeking young generalists courted by traditional VCs, but rather are best addressed by career professionals who have spent the last decade or more executing on very similar work).
Atlas Computing is looking to hire a cohort of Field Strategists, each of whom will scope multiple potential interventions simultaneously and hand them all off.
While this is a separate role from our Founders (who will scope a single intervention they would then lead themselves), we expect the Field Strategists will work closely in collaboration with our cohort of Founders.
While Atlas is interested in many aspects of AI Resilience, we expect this first cohort will likely focus on some combination of AI infrastructure security (especially these 6 problems) and epistemic security; we will prioritize candidates with relevant experience.
New types of organization are needed to accelerate scientific progress.
Academic research groups and startup companies are essential to science and technology development. But there are some projects they just aren’t suited for. A university astronomy lab couldn’t have launched the Hubble Space Telescope on its own, nor would a venture-backed startup have built the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Hubble and CERN illustrate a common pattern in science: a need for projects that are bigger than an academic lab can undertake, more coordinated than a loose consortium or themed department, and not directly profitable enough to be a venture-backed startup or industrial R&D project.
Focused Research Organizations (FROs) are a new type of scientific institution designed to fill this gap.
