I’m now working on AI safety and I’ve been really happily surprised at the opportunities available to people trying to get into the field. There are courses (AGISF, ML Safety Scholars), internship / research opportunities, various competitions, and EAF + LW to showcase public writing. I basically worked on non-EA stuff for three years while reading about AI Safety for fun and ended up pretty well positioned to work on it.
I like the idea of building skills early in your career. I would specifically highlight being opportunistic — individual people run into unusual opportunities to do difficult and valuable things, and especially early in your career it’s worth doing them. This is mostly based on my n=1 personal experience, I wrote a little more about it here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AKLMZzsTc2ghxohhq/how-and-when-should-we-incentivize-people-to-leave-ea?commentId=w6RJ7L6H4nrJhFyAM
I’m now working on AI safety and I’ve been really happily surprised at the opportunities available to people trying to get into the field. There are courses (AGISF, ML Safety Scholars), internship / research opportunities, various competitions, and EAF + LW to showcase public writing. I basically worked on non-EA stuff for three years while reading about AI Safety for fun and ended up pretty well positioned to work on it.