T o w a r d

SMARTER

SAFER

Artificial Intelligence

Our Mission

The Centaur AI Institute is a non-profit scientific organization whose mission is to 1) illuminate the technical path to safer and more capable AI through fundamental research and 2) advance its adoption through education throughout the AI ecosystem.

WHAT is the Institute?

The Centaur AI Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization whose goal is to achieve safe/reliable AI, with the hypothesis that an emerging set of “neuro-symbolic” ideas which incorporate both learning and knowledge/reasoning can provide the path toward resolving many if not most of the key issues preventing the use of AI in cannot-fail use cases such as in medicine, law, defense, transportation, financial systems, or conversational systems for performing transactions.

More broadly, the underlying technical issues are also fundamentally at the root of achieving greater capability and generality in AI. An upshot of these ideas is that new human-AI systems (“centaur AI” or human-in-the-loop systems) can be built where humans provide and interact with symbolic knowledge and are essential to AI rather than dispensible.

WHY was the Institute created?

The questions are both important enough and difficult enough to necessitate the formation of a new entity primarily motivated by the public good rather than profits, and insulated from the commercial conflicts of interest and short-term motivations, timelines, and instabilities of even the largest industrial labs. As almost all other non-profit organizations addressing safe AI appear to be policy-focused rather than technically oriented, and almost all organizations nominally addressing safe AI technically appear to be for-profit and focused on current mainstream technologies, we seek to fill the void rather than pursue either of those avenues.

WHO are the people of the Institute?

The Institute has its own staff, a large network of close collaborators in academia (including Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard, Yale, Purdue, Univ Sao Paulo, etc) and elsewhere who can be funded by Centaur, and many collaborators with jobs at commercial entities who work on a volunteer basis. Centaur forms dynamic project teams spanning experts in:

  • KRR: Logical reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, probabilistic graphical models, causality

  • ML: Deep learning, broader machine learning, reinforcement learning, statistics, data science

  • Computation: Algorithms, optimization, 10x programming

  • Beyond: Information theory, linguistics, semantics, neuroscience

  • The Institute is headquartered in California but operates via remote collaboration internationally. Centaur’s events are generally held virtually, with the exception of those that may be held as part of existing conferences such as workshops at AAAI and NeSy. Its scientific leadership is in the Los Angeles area. Its administrative address is: 69 Lincoln Blvd, Ste A240, Lincoln, CA 95648-6304.

  • We are inspired by the great era of art deco in public architecture, which marked a pivotal time of transition between the fluidity of classicism and the clean geometric lines of modernism, effectively combining both to achieve a uniquely balanced elegance which both celebrated the emerging power of the machine and maintained the beauty of nature and mankind.

    The images are generally of famous public buidings with unknown attribution (if one of these images is yours, please let us know!).

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