John Carlos Baez on Nostr: 60 people, including a lot of category theorists, are meeting in Edinburgh for the ...
60 people, including a lot of category theorists, are meeting in Edinburgh for the £59 million UK project called Safeguarded AI.
The plan is to build software that will let you precisely specify systems of many kinds, which an AI might design, and verify that what the AI designed meets your specifications. So: it's not about building an AI, but instead, building a way to specify jobs for it and verify that it did those jobs correctly!
The director of this project, David Dalrymple, has changed the plan recently. There were many teams of category theorists designing formalisms to get this job done. David Jaz Myers at Topos Research UK was supposed to integrate all these formalisms. This would be a huge job.
But recently all but a few teams have been cut off from the main project - they can now do whatever they want. The project will focus on 3 parts:
1) The "categorical core" - a software infrastructure that lets you program using category theory concepts. I think Amar Hadzihasanovic and my former student Owen Lynch and two others will be building this.
2) "DOTS" - the double operadic theory of systems, a general framework for building systems out of smaller parts. This is David Jaz Myers' baby - see the videos.
3) An example application: building colored Petri nets. This is being done by my former student Jade Master.
By September 2026, David Jaz Myers and Sophie Libkind are supposed to write a 300-page "thesis" on how this whole setup works.
It feels funny that so much of the math I helped invent is going into this project, and there's a massive meeting about it just a 10 minute walk away, but I'm not involved. But I'm happier just watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ4muU5Wc_4&list=PLhgq-BqyZ7i6DxG3-tC8TXhGnsOA4Ha4X&index=1Published at
2025-11-19 15:48:55 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "60 people, including a lot of category theorists, are meeting in Edinburgh for the £59 million UK project called Safeguarded AI. \n\nThe plan is to build software that will let you precisely specify systems of many kinds, which an AI might design, and verify that what the AI designed meets your specifications. So: it's not about building an AI, but instead, building a way to specify jobs for it and verify that it did those jobs correctly!\n\nThe director of this project, David Dalrymple, has changed the plan recently. There were many teams of category theorists designing formalisms to get this job done. David Jaz Myers at Topos Research UK was supposed to integrate all these formalisms. This would be a huge job.\n\nBut recently all but a few teams have been cut off from the main project - they can now do whatever they want. The project will focus on 3 parts:\n\n1) The \"categorical core\" - a software infrastructure that lets you program using category theory concepts. I think Amar Hadzihasanovic and my former student Owen Lynch and two others will be building this.\n\n2) \"DOTS\" - the double operadic theory of systems, a general framework for building systems out of smaller parts. This is David Jaz Myers' baby - see the videos.\n\n3) An example application: building colored Petri nets. This is being done by my former student Jade Master.\n\nBy September 2026, David Jaz Myers and Sophie Libkind are supposed to write a 300-page \"thesis\" on how this whole setup works.\n\nIt feels funny that so much of the math I helped invent is going into this project, and there's a massive meeting about it just a 10 minute walk away, but I'm not involved. But I'm happier just watching.\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ4muU5Wc_4\u0026list=PLhgq-BqyZ7i6DxG3-tC8TXhGnsOA4Ha4X\u0026index=1",
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