Ryan Kidd

Karma: 873

Co-Executive Director at ML Alignment & Theory Scholars Program (2022-present)
Co-Founder & Board Member at London Initiative for Safe AI (2023-present)
Manifund Regrantor (2023-present) | RFPs here
Advisor, Catalyze Impact (2023-present) | ToC here
Advisor, AI Safety ANZ (2024-present)
Advisor, Pivotal Research (2024-present)
Advisor, Halcyon Futures (2025-present)
Advisor, Black in AI Safety and Ethics (2025-present)
Advisor, Alignment Foundation (2026-present)
Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Queensland (2017-2023)
Group organizer at Effective Altruism UQ (2018-2021)

Give me feedback! :)

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.

Ryan Kidd 16 Sep 2025 16:27 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: SWE vs AIS
MATS had a 4-7% acceptance rate last program, depending how you counted it.

Ryan Kidd 9 Sep 2025 20:26 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ryan Kidd’s comment on: Ryan Kidd’s Quick takes
Josh Landes shared that BlueDot Impact’s application rate has been increasing by 4.7x/year.

Ryan Kidd 7 Sep 2025 19:19 UTC
11 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Ryan Kidd’s Quick takes
Applications to MATS have been increasing by 70% per year. Is this the growth rate of AI safety?

Ryan Kidd 1 Jun 2025 19:30 UTC
34 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Ryan Kidd’s Quick takes
As part of MATS’ compensation reevaluation project, I scraped the publicly declared employee compensations from ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer for many AI safety and EA organizations (data here) in 2019-2023. US nonprofits are required to disclose compensation information for certain highly paid employees and contractors on their annual Form 990 tax return, which becomes publicly available. This includes compensation for officers, directors, trustees, key employees, and highest compensated employees earning over $100k annually. Therefore, my data does not include many individuals earning under $100k, but this doesn’t seem to affect the yearly medians much, as the data seems to follow a lognormal distribution, with mode ~$178k in 2023, for example.
I generally found that AI safety and EA organization employees are highly compensated, albeit inconsistently between similar-sized organizations within equivalent roles (e.g., Redwood and FAR AI). I speculate that this is primarily due to differences in organization funding, but inconsistent compensation policies may also play a role.
I’m sharing this data to promote healthy and fair compensation policies across the ecosystem. I believe that MATS salaries are quite fair and reasonably competitive after our recent salary reevaluation, where we also used Payfactors HR market data for comparison. If anyone wants to do a more detailed study of the data, I highly encourage this!
I decided to exclude OpenAI’s nonprofit salaries as I didn’t think they counted as an “AI safety nonprofit” and their highest paid current employees are definitely employed by the LLC. I decided to include Open Philanthropy’s nonprofit employees, despite the fact that their most highly compensated employees are likely those under the Open Philanthropy LLC.

Ryan Kidd 13 Apr 2025 18:12 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Chinwe’s comment on: MATS is hiring!
Hi Chinwe! We prefer applicants with US work authorization, but we can support US visas. Unfortunately, these roles are not remote.

Ryan Kidd 9 Mar 2025 22:07 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ryan Kidd’s comment on: Meridian Cambridge Visiting Researcher Programme: Turn AI safety ideas into funded projects in one week!
If I were building a grantwriting bootcamp, my primary concerns would be:
- Where will successful grantees work?
  - I’ve found that independent researchers greatly benefit from a shared office space and community, for social connection, high-quality peer feedback, and centralizing operations costs.
  - Current AI safety offices seem to be overflowing. We likely need further, high-capacity AI safety offices to support the influx of independent researchers from Open Phil’s RFPs.
  - I think that, in general, employment in a highly effective organization is more impactful than independent research for the majority of projects and researchers. While I greatly support the new Open Phil RFPs, I hope that more of their grants go towards setting up highly effective organizations, like nonprofit FROs, that can absorb and scale talent.
  - I see the primary benefit of the MATS extension program as a means of providing further research mentorship (albeit with more accountability and autonomy than the main program) with longer time horizons to complete research projects. The infrastructure we provide is quite significant and increasing the number of independent researchers without also scaling long-term support systems will likely not see optimal results.
- How will successful grantees obtain mentorship and high-quality feedback loops?
  - Even with the optimal project proposal, emerging researchers seem to benefit substantially from high quality mentorship, particularly over the course of a research project. I do not believe that all of this support should be front-loaded.
  - I would support an accompanying long-term peer support or mentorship program after the grantwriting bootcamp. I apologize if you were already planning this!
- Who will employ grantees on the conclusion of their research?
  - This is a significant question to MATS as well. I currently believe that high-quality research during the program is a strong enough output alone to justify the cost. However, ideally, most MATS alumni would find employment post-program. The main roadblocks to this employment seem to be software engineering skills (which points to ARENA-like coding bootcamps as a solution) and high-quality peer-reviewed publications (which usually need strong mentorship).
  - At the moment, I think “better grant proposals” is not a significant bottleneck to MATS alumni getting jobs. Rather, I think coding skills and high quality publications are the limiting factors. Also, I think there are far too few jobs to go around compared to the scale of the AI safety problem, so I also support more startup accelerators.

Ryan Kidd 9 Mar 2025 19:13 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Meridian Cambridge Visiting Researcher Programme: Turn AI safety ideas into funded projects in one week!
This seems like a great initiative! However, I don’t expect this “grantwriting bootcamp” model to benefit the majority of MATS alumni compared to:
- Longer duration, more resourced independent research programs like the MATS extension program, Constellation Visiting Fellows Program, and the CHAI Research Fellowship that provide high-quality mentorship and job security for 6-12 months;
- Dedicated start-up incubator programs like Catalyze Impact, Entrepeneur First def/acc, and Y Combinator that provide seed funding, co-founder matching, and start-up advice;
- Longer duration, more established academic PhD/Postdoc programs that provide high-quality mentorship and legible credentials, e.g. via the Vitalik Buterin PhD Fellowship in AI Existential Safety and labs like UCB CHAI, NYU ARG, MIT AAG, Mila, KASL, MIT Tegmark Group, etc.
I can’t speak for the other AI safety research programs on your list, but from my experience at MATS, alumni are principally worried about (in order):
1. Software engineering skills to pass AI lab coding tests;
2. High-quality peer-reviewed publications at top ML conferences to get into AI lab research jobs or top PhD programs;
3. Further high-quality mentorship;
4. Further connections to research collaborators.
In the past, acceptance into the MATS extension program literally required submitting a grant proposal and receiving external funding, generally from the LTFF or Open Phil. On average, 81% of alumni who apply have received LTFF or Open Phil grants (or equivalent AI lab contracting roles) for independent research post-program, even without the current (large) RFPs! Our Research Management staff are trained to help scholars submit AI safety grant proposals and we require all scholars to complete a Research Plan mid-program that doubles as a grant proposal. I think that the optimal program to help most MATS alumni looks less like a “grantwriting bootcamp” (though I’m sure some will benefit) and more like the programs I listed above. That said, I think the grantwriting bootcamp model will certainly benefit some early career researchers. I’m happy to call and chat more about this if you like!

Ryan Kidd 5 Mar 2025 0:00 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Examples of success from city and national groups
Also, Apollo Research and Leap Labs grew out of the MATS London Office (what later became LISA). I realize this was an AI safety office, not an EA office, but it feels significant.

Ryan Kidd 16 Jan 2025 21:24 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Alex (Αλέξανδρος)’s comment on: Implications of the inference scaling paradigm for AI safety
Yep, seems important. But I don’t think this is particularly salient to the topic of the post: changes to AI safety priorities based on the new inference scaling paradigm.

Ryan Kidd 13 Nov 2024 2:58 UTC
15 points
1 ∶ 0
on: How would your project use extra funding? (Marginal Funding Week 2024)
TL;DR: MATS is fundraising for Summer 2025 and could support more scholars at $35k/scholar
Ryan Kidd here, MATS Co-Executive Director :)
The ML Alignment & Theory Scholars (MATS) Program is twice-yearly independent research and educational seminar program that aims to provide talented scholars with talks, workshops, and research mentorship in the fields of AI alignment, interpretability, and governance and connect them with the Berkeley AI safety research community. The Winter 2024-25 Program will run Jan 6-Mar 14, 2025 and our Summer 2025 Program is set to begin in June 2025. We are currently accepting donations for our Summer 2025 Program and beyond. We would love to include additional interested mentors and scholars at $35k/scholar. We have substantially benefited from individual donations in the past and were able to support ~11 additional scholars due to Manifund donations.
MATS helps expand the talent pipeline for AI safety research by empowering scholars to work on AI safety at existing research teams, found new research teams, and pursue independent research. To this end, MATS connects scholars with research mentorship and funding, and provides a seminar program, office space, housing, research management, networking opportunities, community support, and logistical support to scholars. MATS supports mentors with logistics, advertising, applicant selection, and research management, greatly reducing the barriers to research mentorship. Immediately following each program is an optional extension phase in London where top performing scholars can continue research with their mentors. For more information about MATS, please see our recent reports: Alumni Impact Analysis, Winter 2023-24 Retrospective, Summer 2023 Retrospective, and Talent Needs of Technical AI Safety Teams.
You can see further discussion of our program on our website and Manifund page. Please feel free to AMA in the comments here :)
What links here?
- Meet the candidates in the Forum’s Donation Election (2024) by Toby Tremlett🔹 (18 Nov 2024 12:10 UTC; 79 points)

Ryan Kidd 28 May 2024 18:26 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jamie_Harris’s comment on: Talent Needs of Technical AI Safety Teams
Yeah, we deliberately refrained from commenting much on the talent needs for founding new orgs. Hopefully, we will have more to say on this later, but it feels somewhat pinned to AI safety macrostrategy, which is complicated.

Ryan Kidd 27 May 2024 22:12 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jamie_Harris’s comment on: Talent Needs of Technical AI Safety Teams
Cheers, Jamie! Keep in mind, however, that these are current needs, and teenagers will likely be facing a job market with future needs. As we say in the report:
...predictions about future talent needs from interviewees didn’t consistently point in the same direction.

Ryan Kidd 21 Mar 2024 17:27 UTC
10 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Who’s hiring? (Feb-May 2024)
MATS is now hiring for three roles!
- Program Generalist (London) (1 hire, starting ASAP);
- Community Manager (Berkeley) (1 hire, starting Jun 3);
- Research Manager (Berkeley) (1-3 hires, starting Jun 3).
We are generally looking for candidates who:
- Are excited to work in a fast-paced environment and are comfortable switching responsibilities and projects as the needs of MATS change;
- Want to help the team with high-level strategy;
- Are self-motivated and can take on new responsibilities within MATS over time; and
- Care about what is best for the long-term future, independent of MATS’ interests.
Please apply via this form and share via your networks.

Ryan Kidd 25 Jan 2024 2:25 UTC
39 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Impact Assessment of AI Safety Camp (Arb Research)
Thanks for publishing this, Arb! I have some thoughts, mostly pertaining to MATS:
1. MATS believes a large part of our impact comes via accelerating researchers who might still enter AI safety, but would otherwise take significantly longer to spin up as competent researchers, rather than converting people into AIS researchers. MATS highly recommends that applicants have already completed AI Safety Fundamentals and most of our applicants come from personal recommendations or AISF alumni (though we are considering better targeted advertising to professional engineers and established academics). Here is a simplified model of the AI safety technical research pipeline as we see it.
  
  Why do we emphasize acceleration over conversion? Because we think that producing a researcher takes a long time (with a high drop-out rate), often requires apprenticeship (including illegible knowledge transfer) with a scarce group of mentors (with high barrier to entry), and benefits substantially from factors such as community support and curriculum. Additionally, MATS’ acceptance rate is ~15% and many rejected applicants are very proficient researchers or engineers, including some with AI safety research experience, who can’t find better options (e.g., independent research is worse for them). MATS scholars with prior AI safety research experience generally believe the program was significantly better than their counterfactual options, or was critical for finding collaborators or co-founders (alumni impact analysis forthcoming). So, the appropriate counterfactual for MATS and similar programs seems to be, “Junior researchers apply for funding and move to a research hub, hoping that a mentor responds to their emails, while orgs still struggle to scale even with extra cash.”
2. The “push vs. pull” model seems to neglect that e.g. many MATS scholars had highly paid roles in industry (or de facto offers given their qualifications) and chose to accept stipends at $30-50/h because working on AI safety is intrinsically a “pull” for a subset of talent and there were no better options. Additionally, MATS stipends are basically equivalent to LTFF funding; scholars are effectively self-employed as independent researchers, albeit with mentorship, operations, research management, and community support. Also, 63% of past MATS scholars have applied for funding immediately post-program as independent researchers for 4+ months as part of our extension program (many others go back to finish their PhDs or are hired) and 85% of those have been funded. I would guess that the median MATS scholar is slightly above the level of the median LTFF grantee from 2022 in terms of research impact, particularly given the boost they give to a mentor’s research.
3. Comparing the cost of funding marginal good independent researchers ($80k/year) to the cost of producing a good new researcher ($40k) seems like a false equivalence if you can’t have one without the other. I believe the most taut constraint on producing more AIS researchers is generally training/mentorship, not money. Even wizard software engineers generally need an on-ramp for a field as pre-paradigmatic and illegible as AI safety. If all MATS’ money instead went to the LTFF to support further independent researchers, I believe that substantially less impact would be generated. Many LTFF-funded researchers have enrolled in MATS! Caveat: you could probably hire e.g. Terry Tao for some amount of money, but this would likely be very large. Side note: independent researchers are likely cheaper than scholars in managed research programs or employees at AIS orgs because the latter two have overhead costs that benefit researcher output.
4. Some of the researchers who passed through AISC later did MATS. Similarly, several researchers who did MLAB or REMIX later did MATS. It’s often hard to appropriately attribute Shapley value to elements of the pipeline, so I recommend assessing orgs addressing different components of the pipeline by how well they achieve their role, and distributing funds between elements of the pipeline based on how much each is constraining the flow of new talent to later sections (anchored by elasticity to funding). For example, I believe that MATS and AISC should be assessed by their effectiveness (including cost, speedup, and mentor time) at converting “informed talent” (i.e., understands the scope of the problem) into “empowered talent” (i.e., can iterate on solutions and attract funding/get hired). This said, MATS aims to improve our advertising towards established academics and software engineers, which might bypass the pipeline in the diagram above. Side note: I believe that converting “unknown talent” into “informed talent” is generally much cheaper than converting “informed talent” into “empowered talent.”
5. Several MATS mentors (e.g., Neel Nanda) credit the program for helping them develop as research leads. Similarly, several MATS alumni have credited AISC (and SPAR) for helping them develop as research leads, similar to the way some Postdocs or PhDs take on supervisory roles on the way to Professorship. I believe the “carrying capacity” of the AI safety research field is largely bottlenecked on good research leads (i.e., who can scope and lead useful AIS research projects), especially given how many competent software engineers are flooding into AIS. It seems a mistake not to account for this source of impact in this review.

Ryan Kidd 7 Dec 2023 20:57 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: MATS Summer 2023 Postmortem
Cheers, Nick! We decided to change the title to “retrospective” based on this and some LessWrong comments.

Ryan Kidd 15 Nov 2023 22:18 UTC
21 points
2 ∶ 0
on: How would your project use extra funding? (Marginal Funding Week)
TL;DR: MATS could support another 10-15 scholars at $21k/scholar with seven more high-impact mentors (Anthropic, DeepMind, Apollo, CHAI, CAIS)
The ML Alignment & Theory Scholars (MATS) Program is twice-yearly educational seminar and independent research program that aims to provide talented scholars with talks, workshops, and research mentorship in the field of AI alignment and connect them with the Berkeley AI safety research community.
MATS helps expand the talent pipeline for AI safety research by empowering scholars to work on AI safety at existing research teams, found new research teams, and pursue independent research. To this end, MATS connects scholars with research mentorship and funding, and provides a seminar program, office space, housing, research coaching, networking opportunities, community support, and logistical support to scholars. MATS supports mentors with logistics, advertising, applicant selection, and complementary scholar support and research management systems, greatly reducing the barriers to research mentorship.
The Winter 2023-24 Program will run Jan 8-Mar 15 in Berkeley, California and feature seminar talks from leading AI safety researchers, workshops on research strategy, and networking events with the Bay Area AI safety community. We currently have funding for ~50 scholars and 23 mentors, but could easily use more.
We are currently funding constrained and accepting donations. We would love to include up to seven additional interested mentors from Anthropic, Apollo Research, CAIS, Google DeepMind, UC Berkeley CHAI, and more, with up to 10-15 additional scholars at $21k/scholar.
What links here?
- Meet the candidates in the Forum’s Donation Election (2023) by Lizka (28 Nov 2023 14:23 UTC; 67 points)

Ryan Kidd 8 Nov 2023 1:14 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ryan Kidd’s comment on: Apply to the Constellation Visiting Researcher Program and Astra Fellowship, in Berkeley this Winter
Buck Shlegeris, Ethan Perez, Evan Hubinger, and Owain Evans are mentoring in both programs. The links show their MATS projects, “personal fit” for applicants, and (where applicable) applicant selection questions, designed to mimic the research experience.
Astra seems like an obviously better choice for applicants principally interested in:
- AI governance: MATS has no AI governance mentors in the Winter 2023-24 Program, whereas Astra has Daniel Kokotajlo, Richard Ngo, and associated staff at ARC Evals and Open Phil;
- Worldview investigations: Astra has Ajeya Cotra, Tom Davidson, and Lukas Finnvedan, whereas MATS has no Open Phil mentors;
- ARC Evals: While both programs feature mentors working on evals, only Astra is working with ARC Evals;
- AI ethics: Astra is working with Rob Long.