Thanks for writing this! It seems like a valuable point to consider, and one that I have been thinking about myself recently.
My guess is that most of the people who are capable of founding an organization are also capable of being middle or senior managers within existing organizations, and my intuition is that they would probably be more impactful there. I’m curious if you have the opposite intuition?
I touched on this a little bit in the post. I think it really depends on a couple of assumptions. 1. How much management would they actually get to do in that org? At the current pace of hiring, it’s unlikely that someone could build a team as quickly as you can with a new org. 2. How different is their agenda from existing ones? What if they have an agenda that is different from any agenda that is currently done in an org? Seems hard/impossible to use the management skills in an existing org then. 3. How fast do we think the landscape has to grow? If we think a handful of orgs with 100-500 members in total is sufficient to address the problem, this is probably the better path. If we think this is not enough, starting and scaling new orgs seems better.
But like I said in the post, for many (probably most) people starting a new org is not the best move. But for some it is and I don’t think we’re supporting this enough as a community.
At the current pace of hiring, it’s unlikely that someone could build a team as quickly as you can with a new org.
Can you say more about why this is?
The standard assumption is that the proportional rate of growth is independent of absolute size, i.e. a large company is as likely to grow 10% as a small company is. As a result, large companies are much more likely to grow in absolute terms than small companies are.[1]
I could imagine various reasons why AI safety might deviate from the norm here, but am not sure which of them you are arguing for. (Sorry if this was in the post and I’m not able to find it.)
My understanding is that there is dispute about whether these quantities are actually independent, but I’m not aware of anything suggesting that small companies will generally grow in absolute terms faster than large companies (and understand that there is substantial empirical evidence which suggests the opposite).
Many people live in an area (or country) where there isn’t even a single AI safety organization, and can’t or don’t want to move. In that sense—no they can’t even join an existing organization (in any level).
(I think founding an organization has other advantages over joining an existing one, but this is my top disagreement.)
Thanks for writing this! It seems like a valuable point to consider, and one that I have been thinking about myself recently.
My guess is that most of the people who are capable of founding an organization are also capable of being middle or senior managers within existing organizations, and my intuition is that they would probably be more impactful there. I’m curious if you have the opposite intuition?
I touched on this a little bit in the post. I think it really depends on a couple of assumptions.
1. How much management would they actually get to do in that org? At the current pace of hiring, it’s unlikely that someone could build a team as quickly as you can with a new org.
2. How different is their agenda from existing ones? What if they have an agenda that is different from any agenda that is currently done in an org? Seems hard/impossible to use the management skills in an existing org then.
3. How fast do we think the landscape has to grow? If we think a handful of orgs with 100-500 members in total is sufficient to address the problem, this is probably the better path. If we think this is not enough, starting and scaling new orgs seems better.
But like I said in the post, for many (probably most) people starting a new org is not the best move. But for some it is and I don’t think we’re supporting this enough as a community.
Can you say more about why this is?
The standard assumption is that the proportional rate of growth is independent of absolute size, i.e. a large company is as likely to grow 10% as a small company is. As a result, large companies are much more likely to grow in absolute terms than small companies are.[1]
I could imagine various reasons why AI safety might deviate from the norm here, but am not sure which of them you are arguing for. (Sorry if this was in the post and I’m not able to find it.)
My understanding is that there is dispute about whether these quantities are actually independent, but I’m not aware of anything suggesting that small companies will generally grow in absolute terms faster than large companies (and understand that there is substantial empirical evidence which suggests the opposite).
Many people live in an area (or country) where there isn’t even a single AI safety organization, and can’t or don’t want to move. In that sense—no they can’t even join an existing organization (in any level).
(I think founding an organization has other advantages over joining an existing one, but this is my top disagreement.)