Thanks for writing this, its great to hear your thoughts on talent pipelines in AIS.
I agree with your model of AISC, MATS and your diagram of talent pipelines. I generally see MATS as a “next step” after AISC for many participants. Because of that, its true that we can’t cleanly compare the cost-per-researcher-produced between programs at different points in the pipeline since they are complements rather than substitutes.
A funder would have to consider how to distribute funding between these options (e.g. conversion vs. acceleration) and that’s something I’m hoping to model mathematically at some point.
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.
Good idea, this could be a valuable follow-up analysis. To give this a proper treatment, we would need a model for how students and mentors interact to (say) produce more research and estimate how much they compliment each other.
In general, we assumed that impacts were negligible if we couldn’t model or measure them well in order to get a more conservative estimate. But hopefully we can build the capacity to consider these things!
I completely agree! The definition of marginal is somewhat ambiguous the way I’ve written it. What I mean to say is that the marginal project is the one that is close to the funding bar, like you pointed out.