AI safety, governance, and alignment research and field buiilding.
GabeM
Karma: 410
The Tree of Life: Stanford AI Alignment Theory of Change
Thanks for writing this, just filled out the form! I’m excited for a more coordinated community around AI safety field-building in universities!
Thanks for this! One response I’ve read about Claim 1 in particular is something along the lines of “promising students tend to emphasize CB while in school because they are positioned to have a greater impact that way, but when they graduate many (most?) of them slow down CB and move into up-skilling/direct work.”
That may still not be an ideal scenario under Claim 1 because it means those promising people are delayed in realizing their direct impact, but I wonder if anyone has anecdotal evidence of this kind of effect persistent or decaying after university?
Thanks for making this!
In the future, you may want to ask just one full name question for people who don’t fit neatly into the first name/last name split.
Thanks Chris! Yeah, I think that’s definitely a potential downside—I imagine we’ll definitely meet at least a couple of people smack in the middle of the quarter who go “Wow, that sounds cool, and also I never heard about this before” (this has happened with other clubs at Stanford).
I think the ways to mitigate failure due to this effect are:
Outreach early (when students still read their emails) and widely (to hopefully get the invitation message to everyone who would consider joining).
Don’t turn down students we find later, instead offer a lot of encouragement and a follow-up plan to join the reading group next term (10-week quarters for us).
This has the downside of latency in that we’re potentially delaying an impactful career, though maybe this isn’t significant compared to the latency of taking enough courses/doing enough research to graduate.
Semester schools could also offer the reading group twice per ~15-week semester, though that sounds a bit intense.
For promising students waiting for the next term, still offer them 1-on-1s, suggest things for them to read/work on independently, invite them to special reading group events like visits from guest alignment professionals, and maybe invite them to some core-only events.
Alternatively, if we find a student who has already read a bit, we could consider having them join a reading group cohort part-way through the year.