I had the privilege of attending Stuart Russell’s annual IASEAI (pronounced as 'eye-see-eye') conference on 2025 February 6-7, in Paris, France. The conference was, in many ways, great: it brought together people from the AI Safety and Ethics communities, it provided an opportunity for people from various backgrounds to participate, it had a prestigious venue, and it had a smooth attendee experience overall. 

This post is not about these great qualities, it’s about the two things it missed out on. Here are my experiences and reflections for conferences in general. 

On networking

In short, the conference didn’t do a good job of facilitating networking, which, in my opinion, is 70-90% of the value that such conferences can and should provide.   

Most events don’t do this well. First-time attendees often come with people they already know and stick together for most of the conference, mainly attending talks and failing to make many new connections. More experienced conference-goers know that this is not the way, so they “get out there” and say hi to people they don’t know. I was in that category, though I expect my social battery drains faster than that of most people. 

However, such an approach still misses out on most of the value such a conference has the potential to provide. This is because at an event of 100s of people, attendees have a really small chance of bumping into people with whom they would most benefit from talking to. While one can have pleasant small talk and learn about ideas they otherwise would not have heard about, this is far from being as useful as finding the top 20 people who are most relevant in terms of their work and have the chance of talking to them for 30 minutes each.

This is what networking apps can provide.

I’m personally familiar with Swapcard, as many are in the AI Safety community.

Here is what participants can do with it:

-Upload an introduction about themselves, and browse the profiles of other attendees

-Schedule 1-1 meetings during the conference to network, ask for advice, learn about people’s work, etc.

-Access the schedule and book their slots for sessions with a limited capacity

-Read about the speakers and organisations presenting at the conference

-Look at the floor plan

-Read the attendee guide

-Browse side events

-Report problems real-time to the organisers during the conference

-Give feedback after the events

-Anything else that organisers might want to share with attendees

Networking apps are immensely useful, so I hope that in the future IASEA and other conferences aiming to make AI go well, make use of them. 

Target audience

As I mentioned above, I really liked the fact that the conference brought together people from the AI Safety and AI Ethics communities. However, the group that it missed out on are the people these communities are trying to influence: policymakers. I haven’t checked this personally, but someone told me that out of the ~650 participants, only a couple of people had any government affiliation. For future conferences, it should be a big priority to get this group in the room too.

Next steps

Along with this post, I’m also publishing a vision of what I see as highly successful AI Safety conferences look like, and inviting you to make them happen. You can read it here.