Some other considerations I think might be relevant:
Are there top labs/research outfits that are eager for top technical talent, and don’t care that much how up to speed that talent is on AI safety in particular? If so, seems like you could just attract eg. math Olympiad finalists or something and give them a small amount of field-specific info to get them started. But if lots of AI safety-specific onboarding is required, that’s pretty bad for movement building.
How deep is the well of untapped potential talent in various ways/various places? Seems like there’s lots and lots of outreach at top US universities right now, arguably even too much for image reasons. There’s probably not enough in eg. India or something—it might be really fruitful to make a concerted effort to find AI Safety Ramanujan. But maybe he ends up at Harvard anyway.
Looking at current top safety researchers, were they as a rule at it for several years before producing anything useful? My impression is that a lot of them came on to the field pretty strong almost right away, or after just a year or so of spinning up. It wouldn’t surprise me if many sufficiently smart people don’t need long at all. But maybe I’m wrong!
The ‘scaling up’ step interests me. How much does this happen? How big of a scale is necessary?
Retention seems maybe relevant too. Very hard to predict how many group participants will stick with the field, and for how long. Introduces a lot of risk, though maybe not relevant for timelines per se.
Some other considerations I think might be relevant:
Are there top labs/research outfits that are eager for top technical talent, and don’t care that much how up to speed that talent is on AI safety in particular? If so, seems like you could just attract eg. math Olympiad finalists or something and give them a small amount of field-specific info to get them started. But if lots of AI safety-specific onboarding is required, that’s pretty bad for movement building.
How deep is the well of untapped potential talent in various ways/various places? Seems like there’s lots and lots of outreach at top US universities right now, arguably even too much for image reasons. There’s probably not enough in eg. India or something—it might be really fruitful to make a concerted effort to find AI Safety Ramanujan. But maybe he ends up at Harvard anyway.
Looking at current top safety researchers, were they as a rule at it for several years before producing anything useful? My impression is that a lot of them came on to the field pretty strong almost right away, or after just a year or so of spinning up. It wouldn’t surprise me if many sufficiently smart people don’t need long at all. But maybe I’m wrong!
The ‘scaling up’ step interests me. How much does this happen? How big of a scale is necessary?
Retention seems maybe relevant too. Very hard to predict how many group participants will stick with the field, and for how long. Introduces a lot of risk, though maybe not relevant for timelines per se.