I personally am also often annoyed at EAs preferring the status/pay/comfort of frontier labs over projects that I think are more impactful. But it nonetheless seems to me like EAs are very disproportionately the ones doing the scrappy and unglamorous work. E.g. frontier lab Trust and Safety teams usually seem like <25% EAs, but the scrappiest/least glamorous AI safety projects I’ve worked on were >80% EAs.
No I’m just concerned that the overwhelming effect of training EAs to do safety stuff that’s highly dependent on where the frontier labs are is them working at frontier labs. In theory there’s plenty of technical stuff to do that’s helpful, but in practice working at a frontier lab is the attractor. There are also knock-on effects in EA as a culture and movement when working at frontier labs is a primary occupation for top talent.
I personally am also often annoyed at EAs preferring the status/pay/comfort of frontier labs over projects that I think are more impactful. But it nonetheless seems to me like EAs are very disproportionately the ones doing the scrappy and unglamorous work. E.g. frontier lab Trust and Safety teams usually seem like <25% EAs, but the scrappiest/least glamorous AI safety projects I’ve worked on were >80% EAs.
I’m curious if your experience is different?
No I’m just concerned that the overwhelming effect of training EAs to do safety stuff that’s highly dependent on where the frontier labs are is them working at frontier labs. In theory there’s plenty of technical stuff to do that’s helpful, but in practice working at a frontier lab is the attractor. There are also knock-on effects in EA as a culture and movement when working at frontier labs is a primary occupation for top talent.