Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence


The Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence is a research center at University of California, Berkeley focusing on advanced artificial intelligence safety methods. CHAI was founded in 2016 by a group of academics led by UC Berkeley computer science professor and AI author Stuart J. Russell. Russell is known for co-authoring the widely used AI textbook .
CHAI's faculty membership includes Bart Selman and Joseph Halpern from Cornell University, Pieter Abbeel from UC Berkeley, and Michael Wellman from the University of Michigan. In 2016, the Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $5,555,550 over five years to support CHAI. CHAI received an additional grant of $200,000 from OpenPhil in 2019.

Research

CHAI's approach to AI safety research focuses on value alignment strategies, particularly inverse reinforcement learning, in which the AI infers human values from observing human behavior. It has also worked on modeling human-machine interaction in scenarios where intelligent machines have an "off-switch" that they are capable of overriding.