MATS has steadily increased in quality over the past two years, and is now more prestigious than AISC. We also have Astra, and people who go directly to residencies at OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. One should expect that AISC doesn’t attract the best talent.
There is so much wrong here, I don’t even know how to start (i.e. I don’t know what the core cruxes are) but I’ll give it a try.
I AISC is not MATS because we’re not trying to be MATS.
MATS is trying to find the best people and have them mentored by the best mentors, in the best environment. This is great! I’d recommend MATS to anyone who can get in. However it’s not scalable. After MATS has taken the top talent and mentors, there are still dosens of people who can mentor and would be happy to do so, and hundreds of people who it is worth mentoring.
To believe that MATS style program is the only program worth running, you have to believe that
Only the top talent matter
MATS and similar program has perfect selection, i.e. no-one worth accepting is ever rejected.
I’m not going to argue about 1. I suspect it’s wrong, but I’m not very sure.
However, believing in 1 is not enough. You also need 2, and believing in 2 is kind of insane. I don’t know how else to put it. Sorry.
You’re absolutely correct that AISC have lower average talent. But because we have a lower bar, we get the talent that MATS and other prestigious programs are missing.
AISC is this way by design. The idea of AISC is to give as many people as we can the chance to join the AI safety effort, to try the waters, or to show the world what they can do, or to get inspiration to do something else.
And I’m not even addressing the accessibility of a part time online program. There are people who can’t join MATS and similar, because they can’t take the time to do so, but can join AISC.
Also, if you believe strongly in MATS ability to select for talent, then consider that some AISC participants go to attend MATS later. I think this fact proves my point, that AISC can support people that MATS selection proses don’t yet recognise.
If so, AISC might not make efficient use of mentor / PI time, which is a key goal of MATS and one of the reasons it’s been successful.
This is again missing the point. The deal AISC offers to our research leads, is that they provide a project and we help them find people to work with them. So far our research leads have been very happy with this arrangement.
MATS is drawing their mentors from a small pool of well known people. This means that they have to make the most out of a very scarce resource. We’re not doing that.
AISC has an open application for people interested in leading a project. This way we get research leads you’ve never heard of, and who are happy to spend time on AISC in exchange for extra hands on their projects.
One reason AISC is much more scalable than MATS is that we’re drawing from a much larger pool of “mentors”.
At this point, someone might think: So AISC has inexperienced mentors leading inexperienced participants. How does this possibly go well?
This is not a trivial question. This is a big part of what the current version of ASIC is focusing on solving. First of all, a research lead is not the same as a mentor. Research leads are welcome to provide mentorship to it’s participants, but that’s not their main role.
The research leads role is to suggest a project and formulate a project plan, and then to lead that project. This is actually much easier to do than to provide general mentorship.
A key part of this are the project plans. As part of the application proses for research leads, we require them to write down a project plan. When necessary, we help them with this.
Another key part of how AISC is successful with less experienced “mentors”, is that we require our research leads to take active part in their projects. This obviously takes up more of their time, but also makes things work better, and to a large extent makes up for the research leads being less experienced than in other programs. And as mentioned, we get lots of project leads who are happy with this arrangement.
What the participants get is learning by doing by being part of a project that at least aims to reduce AI risk.
Some of our participants comes from AI safety Fundamentals and other such courses. Other people are professionals with various skills and talent, but not yet much involvement in AI Safety. We help these people to take the step from AI safety student or AI safety concerned professional, to being someone who actually do something.
Going from just thinking and learning, to actively engaging, is a very big step, and a lot of people would not have taken that step, or taken it later, if not for AISC.
There is so much wrong here, I don’t even know how to start (i.e. I don’t know what the core cruxes are) but I’ll give it a try.
I AISC is not MATS because we’re not trying to be MATS.
MATS is trying to find the best people and have them mentored by the best mentors, in the best environment. This is great! I’d recommend MATS to anyone who can get in. However it’s not scalable. After MATS has taken the top talent and mentors, there are still dosens of people who can mentor and would be happy to do so, and hundreds of people who it is worth mentoring.
To believe that MATS style program is the only program worth running, you have to believe that
Only the top talent matter
MATS and similar program has perfect selection, i.e. no-one worth accepting is ever rejected.
I’m not going to argue about 1. I suspect it’s wrong, but I’m not very sure.
However, believing in 1 is not enough. You also need 2, and believing in 2 is kind of insane. I don’t know how else to put it. Sorry.
You’re absolutely correct that AISC have lower average talent. But because we have a lower bar, we get the talent that MATS and other prestigious programs are missing.
AISC is this way by design. The idea of AISC is to give as many people as we can the chance to join the AI safety effort, to try the waters, or to show the world what they can do, or to get inspiration to do something else.
And I’m not even addressing the accessibility of a part time online program. There are people who can’t join MATS and similar, because they can’t take the time to do so, but can join AISC.
Also, if you believe strongly in MATS ability to select for talent, then consider that some AISC participants go to attend MATS later. I think this fact proves my point, that AISC can support people that MATS selection proses don’t yet recognise.
This is again missing the point. The deal AISC offers to our research leads, is that they provide a project and we help them find people to work with them. So far our research leads have been very happy with this arrangement.
MATS is drawing their mentors from a small pool of well known people. This means that they have to make the most out of a very scarce resource. We’re not doing that.
AISC has an open application for people interested in leading a project. This way we get research leads you’ve never heard of, and who are happy to spend time on AISC in exchange for extra hands on their projects.
One reason AISC is much more scalable than MATS is that we’re drawing from a much larger pool of “mentors”.
At this point, someone might think: So AISC has inexperienced mentors leading inexperienced participants. How does this possibly go well?
This is not a trivial question. This is a big part of what the current version of ASIC is focusing on solving. First of all, a research lead is not the same as a mentor. Research leads are welcome to provide mentorship to it’s participants, but that’s not their main role.
The research leads role is to suggest a project and formulate a project plan, and then to lead that project. This is actually much easier to do than to provide general mentorship.
A key part of this are the project plans. As part of the application proses for research leads, we require them to write down a project plan. When necessary, we help them with this.
Another key part of how AISC is successful with less experienced “mentors”, is that we require our research leads to take active part in their projects. This obviously takes up more of their time, but also makes things work better, and to a large extent makes up for the research leads being less experienced than in other programs. And as mentioned, we get lots of project leads who are happy with this arrangement.
What the participants get is learning by doing by being part of a project that at least aims to reduce AI risk.
Some of our participants comes from AI safety Fundamentals and other such courses. Other people are professionals with various skills and talent, but not yet much involvement in AI Safety. We help these people to take the step from AI safety student or AI safety concerned professional, to being someone who actually do something.
Going from just thinking and learning, to actively engaging, is a very big step, and a lot of people would not have taken that step, or taken it later, if not for AISC.