The project
AI Welfare Seminars is a monthly research series on AI welfare, consciousness, moral status, and digital minds, launched in 2026.
Its theory of change: AI welfare is nascent, and the main bottleneck to progress is the small number of people working on it. Researchers who could enter face entry costs, in that open problems are illegible from the outside, working on a new topic carries career risk, and collaborations require repeated interaction. A curated monthly seminar plus public artifacts lowers these costs: it makes the field more legible, credible speakers legitimate the field, and recurrence plus mixers let collaborations form.
👤 This project will be co-mentored by Jay Luong (Fellowships Lead, Sentient Futures).
The mentee's role
Expected outputs over the 10 weeks:
- A public knowledge base built from the series: session summaries, transcripts, reading notes, and curated reading lists.
- A survey and a light measurement program.
- Support delivering the live seminar editions that fall within the program window.
- A researcher-landscape map: who is working (or should be?) on these questions, and how the field connects.
- An open problems / landscape synthesis of AI welfare research.
It's flexible: we would scope it together in week 1 around the mentee's strengths and interests.
Who I'm looking for
Must-haves:
- Self-directed and reliable
- Strong writing and synthesis
- Organized operator
- Familiarity with the AI welfare/digital minds research landscape
Nice-to-haves:
- Research background
- Prior community-building
- Research-ops
- Knowledge-management experience
Questions for applicants
- What major gaps do you see in the field?
- Suggest 5 speakers for the AI Welfare Seminars series, including potential topics & justifications.
Support offered
- Shaping direction and scoping
- Editorial feedback
- Connections in the space
- A real operating platform
- Weekly accountability check-ins
- format
- Field-building & outreach
- topic
- Artificial sentience · Macrostrategy
Orpheus Lummis
HΩ
I run the Horizon Omega, which is an upcoming AI safety think-and-do-tank non-profit. I organize the AI Welfare Seminars, a monthly research seminar series on AI welfare, consciousness, moral status, and digital minds. I organize AI Safety Montréal and the AI safety coworking and event space Ω Labs.
I'm interested in artificial sentience and in the macrostrategy questions around how we prepare, institutionally and epistemically, for a world containing morally relevant AIs.