In the post about 80K’s pivot to AGI, you discuss active headhunting for specific roles relevant to AGI. To what extent do you expect a candidate in this role (and 80K’s outreach more broadly) to focus on your historic audience (ambitious, altruistic young people) vs active outreach to those with relevant skills for making AGI go well (e.g. ML professionals, lawyers)?
The kind-of-annoying but true answer is “some of both!”
I expect that a reasonably high proportion of our new outreach efforts will be focused on trying to find people who are particularly well-suited to contributing to making AGI go well. But:
I think we’ll continue with a lot of the kinds of outreach that’s worked well for us in the past (since we can continue to execute on it efficiently)
I think we should still take the lowest-hanging fruit of outreach to our historical audiences
I also put quite a lot of weight on the argument that 80k as a product has been historically really valuable to a certain kind of person; we have hypotheses about how / why, but ultimately, making big changes we should expect to see some regression to the mean. So I’m keen for us to not entirely stop using our previous strategy.
But if e.g. the website changes so much that it doesn’t make sense to reach people without a prior interest in AI, then that might change (tho, FWIW, I think this is pretty unlikely, at least in the near future / without the web team’s views changing).
I got another anonymous question! :)
The kind-of-annoying but true answer is “some of both!”
I expect that a reasonably high proportion of our new outreach efforts will be focused on trying to find people who are particularly well-suited to contributing to making AGI go well. But:
I think we’ll continue with a lot of the kinds of outreach that’s worked well for us in the past (since we can continue to execute on it efficiently)
I think we should still take the lowest-hanging fruit of outreach to our historical audiences
I also put quite a lot of weight on the argument that 80k as a product has been historically really valuable to a certain kind of person; we have hypotheses about how / why, but ultimately, making big changes we should expect to see some regression to the mean. So I’m keen for us to not entirely stop using our previous strategy.
But if e.g. the website changes so much that it doesn’t make sense to reach people without a prior interest in AI, then that might change (tho, FWIW, I think this is pretty unlikely, at least in the near future / without the web team’s views changing).