Artificial intelligence (AI) firms are taking the think tank world by storm. Here is the latest from one of them, Anthropic:
We’re launching The Anthropic Institute, a new effort to confront the most significant challenges that powerful AI will pose to our societies. The Anthropic Institute will draw on research from across Anthropic to provide information that other researchers and the public can use during our transition to a world containing much more powerful AI systems.
The Institute is led by our co-founder Jack Clark, who will assume a new role as Anthropic’s Head of Public Benefit. It has an interdisciplinary staff of machine learning engineers, economists, and social scientists, bringing together and expanding three of Anthropic’s research teams: the Frontier Red Team, which stress-tests AI systems to understand the outermost limits of their current capabilities; Societal Impacts, which studies how AI is being used in the real world; and Economic Research, which tracks its impact on jobs and the larger economy. The Institute will also incubate new teams, and is currently working on efforts around forecasting AI progress and better understanding how powerful AI will interact with the legal system.
The new think tank has already made several hires and is still continuing to hire. One job posting for an analyst lists the salary as $295,000 to $345,000.
A number of think tanks have created programs specifically focused on AI, and some AI-specific think tanks have been launched. One example is the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS), which bills itself as "a nonpartisan think tank that produces policy research to address the implications of AI."
Here is a recent piece on the future of think tanks in the age of AI. Here is another piece on how think tanks can respond to the age of AI. Here is another piece on the "triple threat," including AI, facing think tanks.