I was in a similar situation to this with job offers from MIRI (research assistant) and a top quant trading firm (trading intern, with likely transition to full-time), four years ago.
I ended up taking the RA job, and not the internship. A few years later, I’m now a researcher at FHI, concurrently studying a stats PhD at Oxford.
I’m happy with what I decided, and I’d generally recommend people do the same, basically because I think there are enough multi-millionaire EAs to place talent at a large premium, relative to donations. Relative to you, I had a better background for trading, relative to academic AI—I played Poker and gambled successfully on political markets, but my education was in medicine and bioinformatics. So I think for someone like you, the case for a PhD would be stronger than for me.
That said, I do think it depends a lot on personal factors—how deeply interested in AI (safety) are you? How highly-ranked exactly are the quant firm, and the PhD where you end up getting an offer? And so on...
I’d be happy to provide more detailed public or private comments.
Hey Anon,
I was in a similar situation to this with job offers from MIRI (research assistant) and a top quant trading firm (trading intern, with likely transition to full-time), four years ago.
I ended up taking the RA job, and not the internship. A few years later, I’m now a researcher at FHI, concurrently studying a stats PhD at Oxford.
I’m happy with what I decided, and I’d generally recommend people do the same, basically because I think there are enough multi-millionaire EAs to place talent at a large premium, relative to donations. Relative to you, I had a better background for trading, relative to academic AI—I played Poker and gambled successfully on political markets, but my education was in medicine and bioinformatics. So I think for someone like you, the case for a PhD would be stronger than for me.
That said, I do think it depends a lot on personal factors—how deeply interested in AI (safety) are you? How highly-ranked exactly are the quant firm, and the PhD where you end up getting an offer? And so on...
I’d be happy to provide more detailed public or private comments.