I’m not sure what the metric for the “good schools” list is but the ranking seemed off to me. Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, CMU, and UW are generally considered the top CS (and ML) schools. Toronto is also top-10 in CS and particularly strong in ML. All of these rankings are of course a bit silly but I still find it hard to justify the given list unless being located in the UK is somehow considered a large bonus.
Yep, I’d actually just asked to clarify this. I’m listing schools that are good for doing safety work in particular. They may also be biased toward places I know about. If people are trying to become professors, or are not interested in doing safety work in their PhD then I agree they should look at a usual CS university ranking, which would look like what you describe.
That said, at Oxford there are ~10 CS PhD students interested in safety, and a few researchers, and FHI scholarships, which is why it makes it to the Amazing tier. At Imperial, there are 2 students and one professor. But happy to see this list improved.
Okay, thanks for the clarification. I now see where the list comes from, although I personally am bearish on this type of weighting. For one, it ignores many people who are motivated to make AI beneficial for society but don’t happen to frequent certain web forums or communities. Secondly, in my opinion it underrates the benefit of extremely competent peers and overrates the benefit of like-minded peers.
While it’s hard to give generic advice, I would advocate for going to the school that is best at the research topic one is interested in pursuing, or where there is otherwise a good fit with a strong PI (though basing on a single PI rather than one’s top-2/top-3 can sometimes backfire). If one’s interests are not developed enough to have a good sense of topic or PI then I would go with general strength of program.
I’m not sure what the metric for the “good schools” list is but the ranking seemed off to me. Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, CMU, and UW are generally considered the top CS (and ML) schools. Toronto is also top-10 in CS and particularly strong in ML. All of these rankings are of course a bit silly but I still find it hard to justify the given list unless being located in the UK is somehow considered a large bonus.
Yep, I’d actually just asked to clarify this. I’m listing schools that are good for doing safety work in particular. They may also be biased toward places I know about. If people are trying to become professors, or are not interested in doing safety work in their PhD then I agree they should look at a usual CS university ranking, which would look like what you describe.
That said, at Oxford there are ~10 CS PhD students interested in safety, and a few researchers, and FHI scholarships, which is why it makes it to the Amazing tier. At Imperial, there are 2 students and one professor. But happy to see this list improved.
Okay, thanks for the clarification. I now see where the list comes from, although I personally am bearish on this type of weighting. For one, it ignores many people who are motivated to make AI beneficial for society but don’t happen to frequent certain web forums or communities. Secondly, in my opinion it underrates the benefit of extremely competent peers and overrates the benefit of like-minded peers.
While it’s hard to give generic advice, I would advocate for going to the school that is best at the research topic one is interested in pursuing, or where there is otherwise a good fit with a strong PI (though basing on a single PI rather than one’s top-2/top-3 can sometimes backfire). If one’s interests are not developed enough to have a good sense of topic or PI then I would go with general strength of program.