About us
The first organisation working to build a community in Colombia dedicated to the safety of artificial intelligence.
Why we exist
Artificial intelligence systems gain capabilities faster than our understanding of them grows, and very few people are working on the risks this creates. In Colombia, those already in the area worked mostly on their own and, until 2024, no organisation was dedicated to connecting those efforts.
That matters in a country of 52 million people who will use these systems, regulate them and be affected by them. We created AI Safety Colombia so that anyone who wants to work on these problems has a way in, and so that when decisions about AI are made there are people here who understand what is at stake.
We are a small, volunteer organisation. Our work is concrete: training people, supporting research and sustaining the public conversation on these questions in Colombia.
The team
The people who keep this running. We are all volunteers, and the organisation is funded by donations and by the budgets of the programmes we run.
Jose Gelves
Co-founder and director
Digital transformation consultant at Universidad de los Andes for MinTIC, Colombia’s ICT ministry. Pathfinder fellow at Kairos and ambassador for Apart Research.
Fernando Avalos
Co-founder (in memoriam)
He was a researcher at Apart Research and a research engineer and risk analyst at the Observatory of Global Catastrophic Risks.
Camila Beltrán
AI Control group
AI governance consultant for several organisations. Member of the OECD expert group. As a Winter Fellow at GovAI she researched the European regulation of loss-of-control scenarios.
Sofía Botia
Volunteer
Law student at Universidad de los Andes. Research assistant at Penn State and research monitor at Harvard Business School.
Leonardo Párraga
Volunteer
Co-founder and co-director of the Colombian Coalition on Youth, Peace and Security. Master’s in international education policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Manuel Cabrera
Volunteer
Recently worked as a full stack developer at Effective Altruism Uniandes. He has just finished secondary school.
Who we work with
Four organisations in the field with whom we sustain work, and from whom we have also received funding.
Apart Research
They convene research hackathons open to anyone in the world. We open the in-person hub in Bogotá and support the teams competing from here.
BlueDot Impact
Their free courses are the standard way into the field. Through Rapid Grants they fund concrete work: 1.4 million dollars awarded and decisions in three days.
Kairos
Their Pathfinder programme funds and supports people who build AI safety communities: this year, 69 organisers from 50 universities in 12 countries.
Coefficient Giving
They account for much of the philanthropic funding in the field: in 2024 alone they committed some 50 million dollars to technical AI safety research.
Want to volunteer?
There is no membership and no open call: you turn up at an event, a programme or a conversation.