This is an important point. There’s a huge demand for research leads in general, but the people hiring & funding often have pretty narrow interests. If your agenda is legibly exciting to them, then you’re in a great position. Otherwise, there can be very little support for more exploratory work. And I want to emphasize the legible part here: you can do something that’s great & would be exciting to people if they understood it, but novel research is often time-consuming to understand, and these are time-constrained people who will not want to invest that time unless they have a strong signal it’s promising.
A lot of this problem is downstream of very limited grantmaker time in AI safety. I expect this to improve in the near future, but not enough to fully solve the problem.
I do like the idea of a more research agenda agnostic research organization. I’m striving to have FAR be more open-minded, but we can’t support everything so are still pretty opinionated to prioritize agendas that we’re most excited by & which are a good fit for our research style (engineering-intensive empirical work). I’d like to see another org in this space set-up to support a broader range of agendas, and am happy to advise people who’d like to set something like this up.
This is an important point. There’s a huge demand for research leads in general, but the people hiring & funding often have pretty narrow interests. If your agenda is legibly exciting to them, then you’re in a great position. Otherwise, there can be very little support for more exploratory work. And I want to emphasize the legible part here: you can do something that’s great & would be exciting to people if they understood it, but novel research is often time-consuming to understand, and these are time-constrained people who will not want to invest that time unless they have a strong signal it’s promising.
A lot of this problem is downstream of very limited grantmaker time in AI safety. I expect this to improve in the near future, but not enough to fully solve the problem.
I do like the idea of a more research agenda agnostic research organization. I’m striving to have FAR be more open-minded, but we can’t support everything so are still pretty opinionated to prioritize agendas that we’re most excited by & which are a good fit for our research style (engineering-intensive empirical work). I’d like to see another org in this space set-up to support a broader range of agendas, and am happy to advise people who’d like to set something like this up.