Thanks for writing this, I think that attempts of getting more people to work on AI Safety seem pretty worth exploring.
One thought that came to my mind was that it would be great if we could identify AI researchers who have the most potential to contribute to the most bottlenecked issues in AI safety research. One skill seems to be something like “finding structure/good questions/useful framing in a preparadigmatic field”. Maybe we could also identify researchers from other technical fields who have shown to be skilled at this type of work and convince them to give AI safety a shot. Furthermore it would maybe help with scouting junior research talent.
Thank you so much for your kind words, Max! I’m extremely grateful.
I completely agree that if (a big if!) we could identify and recruit AI capabilities researchers who could quickly “plug in” to the current AI safety field, and ideally could even contribute novel and promising directions for “finding structure/good questions/useful framing”, that would be extremely effective. Perhaps a maximally effective use of time and resources for many people.
I also completely agree that experiential learning on how to talent-scout and recruit AI capabilities researchers is likely to be also helpful for recruiting for the AI safety field in general. The transfer will be quite high. (And of course, recruiting junior research talent, etc. will be “easy mode” compared to recruiting AI capabilities researchers.)
Thanks for writing this, I think that attempts of getting more people to work on AI Safety seem pretty worth exploring.
One thought that came to my mind was that it would be great if we could identify AI researchers who have the most potential to contribute to the most bottlenecked issues in AI safety research. One skill seems to be something like “finding structure/good questions/useful framing in a preparadigmatic field”. Maybe we could also identify researchers from other technical fields who have shown to be skilled at this type of work and convince them to give AI safety a shot. Furthermore it would maybe help with scouting junior research talent.
Thank you so much for your kind words, Max! I’m extremely grateful.
I completely agree that if (a big if!) we could identify and recruit AI capabilities researchers who could quickly “plug in” to the current AI safety field, and ideally could even contribute novel and promising directions for “finding structure/good questions/useful framing”, that would be extremely effective. Perhaps a maximally effective use of time and resources for many people.
I also completely agree that experiential learning on how to talent-scout and recruit AI capabilities researchers is likely to be also helpful for recruiting for the AI safety field in general. The transfer will be quite high. (And of course, recruiting junior research talent, etc. will be “easy mode” compared to recruiting AI capabilities researchers.)