It’s happened a few times at our local meetup (South Bay EA) that we get someone new who says something like “okay I’m a fairly good ML student who wants to decide on a research direction for AI Safety.” In the past we’ve given fairly generic advice like “listen to this 80k podcast on AI Safety” or “apply to AIRCS”. One of our attendees went on to join OpenAI’s safety team after this advice, and gave us some attribution for it. While this probably makes folks a little better off, it feels like we could do better for them.
If you had to give someone more concrete object-level advice on how to get started AI safety what would you tell them?
Thank you, Julia, for making the EA movement feel like an actual community by and for human beings.