Divya Siddarth

Social technologist, political economist
Divya Siddarth is building a world where technological progress and democratic participation don't have to trade off.

Why you should listen

Divya Siddarth is the cofounder and executive director of the Collective Intelligence Project (CIP), an experimental research organization which is developing and applying new governance models for artificial intelligence. She believes transformative technologies will only advance the "public good" if we creatively involve the public. As such, collective intelligence is a powerful tool for making AI better. To that end, CIP has worked with partners such as the Taiwanese Digital Ministry, the UK Frontier AI Task Force, OpenAI, Anthropic and Creative Commons on designing "alignment assemblies" — early experiments in demonstrating how the broader public can effectively co-create and improve powerful AI models. Siddarth is also currently the democracy lead for UK's AI Safety Institute.

Before founding CIP, she served as Associate Political Economist and Social Technologist in Microsoft’s Office of the CTO. She graduated from Stanford with a BS in Computational Decision Analysis, and is pursuing a DPhil at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Divya Siddarth’s TED talk