Comments
55
The week‑long Ooty AI Alignment Retreat 2.0 (23–29 June 2025) gathered fifteen selected participants in the Nilgiri hills to explore “gradual disempowerment” risks and experiment hands‑on with today’s frontier models.
Run on a shoestring budget—about US $35 per person for food and lodging—the retreat combined daily embodiment practices with coding sprints, debates and unstructured woods‑walks, all aimed at strengthening a nascent Indian AI‑safety community.
Future plans pivot to smaller, topic‑focused gatherings in Bangalore, both to iterate on format and to keep costs negligible—an approach other EA organisers might copy when seeding AI‑safety capacity in under‑resourced regions.
The detailed retrospective can be found in LW, open‑source tools and willingness to share materials make this a useful template for anyone planning low‑budget, high‑agency field‑building events.
