Cavendish Labs is a research institute based in Cavendish, Vermont focused on AI alignment and pandemic prevention. Our main research areas are the following:

1. Alignment. How do we make sure that AI does what we want? We’ve spent some time thinking about ELK and inverse scaling; however, we think that AGI will most likely be achieved through some sort of model-based RL framework, so that is our current focus. For instance, we know how to induce provable guarantees of behaviour in supervised learning; could we do something similar in RL?
2. Pandemic prevention. A lot of people have heard of the Far-UVC light idea; however, understanding why it works, and whether it works safely, is useful for developing other broad-spectrum viral prevention tools, as well as preventing the engineering of UV-resistant viruses.
3. Diagnostic development. We're interested in designing a low-cost and simple-to-use platform for LAMP reactions so that generalized diagnostic capabilities are more widespread. We envision a world where it is both cheap and easy to run a panel of tests so one can swiftly determine the exact virus behind an infection.

Cavendish Labs

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