Ryan Kidd

• Ryan Kidd 13 Sep 2026 20:10 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ryan Kidd’s comment on: Jenba’s Quick takes

  I think it’s deeply unfortunate if a lot of people are getting turned off AI safety as a cause area because they can’t break into the field. I also think the calls for urgency are justified on impact grounds. Maybe there are low-cost ways to help rejected applicants feel better? I like the idea of publishing application statistics or offering tailored advice to rejected applicants, though the latter is really expensive

  It seems like a lot of people are rejected by Harvard or Google, but are able to pivot to other Ivy League colleges or FAANG companies. At worst, there are second-tier colleges and companies to apply to. I’m not sure this is the case in AI safety, as the field is still very small (2-4k FTEs). It seems like the best thing many rejected applicants can do is apply for a CS PhD or work in a regular tech company to build their skills, which can be deeply unsatisfying for impact-driven people who think AGI is near (as I do).

• Ryan Kidd 13 Sep 2026 19:51 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Jen baik’s comment on: Jenba’s Quick takes

  Do you think the marketing is false because:

  • The roles are getting more than enough qualified, competent applicants?

  • The cause area of AI safety is saturated with talent?

  • AI safety is not impactful enough to justify claims like “this cause area is particularly important to scale”?

  I’m not sure the analogies to Google or Harvard are useful here. These organizations are driven by profits/​enrollments, not by impact. They likely are far less picky than AI safety orgs because they are very big and don’t require the incredibly niche skill-sets and mission alignment of AI safety roles. Google can also pay a ton and both Harvard and Google are conventionally high status, attracting a ton of applicants naturally. One might argue that there is a moral imperative to scale AI safety fast in a way that doesn’t apply to Harvard or Google on the whole. Note that the GDM interpretability team and Harvard AI safety team have called for urgency, independent of Google’s general messaging.

  None of this is to justify the hiring practices at AI safety organizations. I think plenty of operations roles (e.g., HR, finance, legal, marketing, facilities) don’t require deep mission alignment or specialist AI safety skills. At MATS, the hiring rate for ops roles is ~2%; there are just a ton of applicants! Obviously, roles that depend on specialist AI safety skills, knowledge, or connections will be more selective, as well as leadership or independently operating roles, which greatly benefit from deep mission alignment.

  In defence of the call for urgency in combination with the low acceptance rates:

  • AI safety seems really impactful and urgent;

  • Marginally better talent can have outsized impacts in a fast-growing field;

  • Some roles (e.g., grantmakers) are very hard to hire for as the necessary skills are very rare;

  • Emphasizing the important and urgency of AI safety will allow more samples from the distribution of talent, which means better-staffed roles and higher likelihood of finding rare talent.

• Ryan Kidd 10 Sep 2026 21:30 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Do AI safety tal­ent pro­grammes work? No­body has run the study that would tell us.

  Ah, makes sense. In the world where MATS randomizes over applicants for a typical 100+ fellow cohort and we learn after 6-18 months how impactful MATS is, what are the main upsides? My guess:

  • Might help understand how useful fellowship programs are vs. other AI safety interventions, like academic grants or mass-messaging (most of which are also saturated with funding at the moment).

  • Might help better price how cost-effective AI safety is vs. other EA cause areas.

  • Might help MATS staff (e.g., me) work on higher-impact interventions.

• Ryan Kidd 10 Sep 2026 21:06 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Do AI safety tal­ent pro­grammes work? No­body has run the study that would tell us.

  Valid points, all. Re. your last point, if one thinks the default case is doom, once might want to fund a lot of blue sky interventions as the upside potential is stronger than the downside risk.

• Ryan Kidd 10 Sep 2026 19:56 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ryan Kidd’s comment on: Do AI safety tal­ent pro­grammes work? No­body has run the study that would tell us.

  Steelmanning the case for RCTs at MATS:

  • Maybe we are actively causing harm by selecting fellows suboptimally and could improve fast and cheaply.

  • Maybe we can show mentors convincing evidence that helps them select fellows better without risking their support of MATS.

  • Maybe there are strong near-term proxies for impact, like a panel of experts assessing a fellow’s end-of-program research output.

  • Maybe we could just assemble a talent database of everyone working in AI safety and chart their journeys in a way that usefully indicates whether MATS is reliably counterfactual.

• Ryan Kidd 10 Sep 2026 19:43 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ryan Kidd’s comment on: Do AI safety tal­ent pro­grammes work? No­body has run the study that would tell us.

  (Note that challenge trials is probably the wrong framing because the risk is not to MATS participants, but to broader civilization.)

• Ryan Kidd 10 Sep 2026 19:41 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Do AI safety tal­ent pro­grammes work? No­body has run the study that would tell us.

  Just noting that MATS is hiring an Impact Analyst (deadline: Sep 21). Please apply if this sort of thing interests you!

• Ryan Kidd 10 Sep 2026 19:31 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ryan Kidd’s comment on: Do AI safety tal­ent pro­grammes work? No­body has run the study that would tell us.

  It feels like we are constantly in “wartime mentality”, given the arguably civilization-level terminal risks of near-term AGI. Maybe there are cheap interventions that would help us rapidly improve mentor/​fellow selection, like the equivalent of challenge trials for COVID-19 vaccines mid-pandemic? How would you suggest we conduct challenge trials, given the wartime considerations and the fact mentors are volunteers with very selective preferences in fellows?

• Ryan Kidd 10 Sep 2026 19:24 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Do AI safety tal­ent pro­grammes work? No­body has run the study that would tell us.

  I think it could be useful to get data on whether MATS is optimally doing selection via the randomized process you describe, but I don’t think it would be particularly high impact. Here’s why:

  • We are racing against time. We only have a few years, on median, until we achieve AGI and every MATS cohort counts. If we select marginally worse fellows now, particularly for the highest-impact mentors, this could have massive negative implications in the longterm (particularly via wasting top mentors’ time).

  • Mentors, not fellows, are MATS’ main client. We don’t pay mentors; they volunteer their time. Top mentors don’t want to work with anyone except the best talent. Mentors are the arbiters of fellow selection, not MATS staff; we just help them with selection. We don’t have a mechanism to force mentors to work with fellows they don’t like and if we did, this would dissatisfy our most important client. Strong mentors seem to be much rarer than strong fellows. (Note that we do select a bunch of mentor “diversity picks”, which varies each round and use fellow outcomes and feedback for subsequent rounds of mentor selections.)

  • We don’t seem to have a good mechanism for measuring the counterfactual on a useful timescale. MATS’ most impactful outputs, such as new nonprofit research orgs founded, placements in leading roles at AI safety orgs/​teams, and field-defining research, typically take 6-18 months post-MATS. This is a long time to wait for results!

• Ryan Kidd 10 Sep 2026 19:10 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Do AI safety tal­ent pro­grammes work? No­body has run the study that would tell us.

  I mean, the default case (cG conducting in-depth evaluations) might be better than an “independent analysis”, particularly if cG are vastly better at impact analysis than the independent evaluators. I suspect this is probably true, as cG employ the lion’s share of top grantmakers and evaluators for AI safety and I suspect that evaluating AI safety program impact is highly contingent on very detailed technical understanding of emerging research paradigms and macrostrategy considerations. To evidence the last point, there is serious disagreement in the community about whether RLHF is good or bad for AI safety and “pessimization” effects are strong. Sure, a simple analysis of talent placements in select orgs/​teams, papers published with citation count, orgs founded with funds raised is useful, but it’s very hard to see the counterfactual here.

• Ryan Kidd 9 Sep 2026 19:05 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Do AI safety tal­ent pro­grammes work? No­body has run the study that would tell us.

  Re. “MATS has 60 scholars”, this was the size of the average cohort in 2023, but our cohorts are now 100+ fellows and we run three per year.

• Ryan Kidd 9 Sep 2026 19:01 UTC

  30 points

  4 ∶ 1

  on: Do AI safety tal­ent pro­grammes work? No­body has run the study that would tell us.

  Regarding “the organizations with the most money share the fewest details”:

  • I believe that AI Safety Camp commissioned that independent analysis because their fundraising was largely unsuccessful. The better-funded organizations didn’t have a strong incentive to commission an independent analysis! This is a clear selection effect.

  • I don’t think that an independent analysis is necessarily better than the default. Coefficient Giving has conducted several highly detailed internal investigations into MATS’ impact, for example, though these were never shared publicly. I expect that cG did the same for their other large grantees, which contributed to their confidence.

  • Note that MATS has the most money of these programs and we try to share a lot of data. We could definitely improve, though! Let me know what data would be interesting/​useful.

• Ryan Kidd 9 Sep 2026 19:00 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ryan Kidd’s comment on: Do AI safety tal­ent pro­grammes work? No­body has run the study that would tell us.

  And here is some data from 1 year ago about MATS alumni careers, based on scraping LinkedIn profiles and personal websites.

• Ryan Kidd 9 Sep 2026 18:52 UTC

  14 points

  2 ∶ 1

  on: Do AI safety tal­ent pro­grammes work? No­body has run the study that would tell us.

  Note that the main goal of MATS is to accelerate talent into AI safety careers as fast as possible, not to be entirely counterfactual for getting people hired (though there are many such cases among our alumni, e.g. Sara Price at Anthropic). This is why we deliberately select the strongest talent in our applicant pool and give them all the resources they need to maximally succeed (e.g., mentor, cohort, compute, support staff). Presumably, if the best talent had anywhere better to go (e.g., getting hired immediately), they would do this instead! MATS doesn’t pay that much and is less prestigious than a full-time offer from an AI safety org like UK AISI, Redwood, METR, Apollo, etc.

  Regarding how counterfactual we are in terms of publications or selected organizations, here are some stats from 2 years back. We are working on an updated impact analysis at the moment. Some select quotes from the linked report:

  • 78% of respondents said their publication “possibly” or “probably” would not have happened without MATS. 10% of alumni reported that MATS accelerated publication by more than 6 months; 14% said 1-6 months.

  • Marius Hobbhahn: “Apollo Research would counterfactually not exist without MATS.”

  • Jesse Hoogland: “Something like [the developmental interpretability] agenda [at Timaeus] would have probably come into existence, but we probably accelerated it by more than a year.”

An­nounc­ing the MATS Res­i­dency: A New Path for Ex­pe­rienced Re­searchers Work­ing on AI Safety, or Mov­ing Into it

MATS Au­tumn 2026 Fel­low­ship—Ap­ply by June 7th

• Ryan Kidd 26 Apr 2026 19:53 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What 3,654 Job Post­ings Tell Us About Ta­lent Needs in AI Safety

  This is awesome, Weronika! Would you be able to share the whole dataset?

• Ryan Kidd 30 Nov 2025 17:38 UTC

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Meet the Can­di­dates: Dona­tion Elec­tion 2025

  Shouldn’t the “AI governance” category be “AI safety” instead? Most of the work Apart, Forethought, and MATS do is not AI governance.

• Ryan Kidd 21 Nov 2025 2:00 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What would your or­gani­sa­tion do with ex­tra fund­ing?

  Hi, this Ryan Kidd answering on behalf of MATS Research!

  MATS is currently fundraising for our 2026 programs and beyond. We are the largest AI safety research fellowship and talent pipeline, supporting 100 fellows twice a year. Some impact stats:

  • 446 alumni and 120+ arXiv papers (h-index 37) in 3.5 years.

  • 80% of our pre-2025 alumni work on AI safety and 10% founded AI safety orgs or teams (e.g., Apollo, Timaeus).

  • Participants in our last program rated it 9.4/​10 on average.

  • Former team members have gone on to (re)found Constellation’s Astra Fellowship, manage Anthropic’s AI safety external partnerships, and help other AI safety orgs scale.

  We are well-funded by Coefficient Giving, but have big scaling plans! We want to run an additional fellowship in Fall 2026, expand Summer and Winter 2026 programs to 120 fellows each, and launch a 1-2 year residency program for senior researchers. Each additional fellow costs $40.8k.

  Some testimonials:

  • “Apollo almost certainly would not have happened without MATS.” Marius Hobbhahn (CEO, Apollo Research)

  • “It’s my number one recommendation to people considering work on Al safety.” Jesse Hoogland (Executive Director, Timaeus)

  Please reply here or contact us if you have any questions!

  Donate here.

  What links here?

  • Meet the Can­di­dates: Dona­tion Elec­tion 2025 by Toby Tremlett🔹 (24 Nov 2025 9:51 UTC; 93 points)

• Ryan Kidd 21 Nov 2025 1:40 UTC

  16 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: peterbarnett’s comment on: CEEALAR (EA Ho­tel) Needs a New Roof

  I completely agree. I think more programs like MATS, ARENA, etc. are great! I’m happy to provide resources and accreditation if someone wants to launch e.g. MATSxBlackpool.