Jonathan definitely did a great job in running the community!
Zeming-Learner
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Postmortems: A Policy Report in 2024
Thanks for doing this! This is really helpful in summarizing and describing the current status of the field. I would love to see the follow-up of this description in 2026.
Thumb-up to Ben’s POV, in social science, there is a gigantic literature now focusing on the AI governance, policies that prevent the GAI from causing X-risks. This worth noting as well.
Nice argument! I do agree that the impact assessment tools from development, health, and education should be effectively applied to assess the outcomes of the AI safety talent pipelines.
But the issue in the AI safety talent field is that the supply of talent is new (fellowships), while demand for talent is predictable but not necessarily actual.
In higher education, graduates are expected to get jobs after graduation partially because employment opportunities exist before enrollment. The historical employment opportunities allows the impact assessment to have a good counterfactual comparison.
However, in AI safety, many jobs and positions are being created until the fellows graduate from the program. This makes the impact assessment and the counterfactual evaluation quite different. This is because we don’t know if it’s the AI safety talent program that created the opportunity, or if the AI safety talent program helped talent get into the next job opportunity.
But still an exciting analysis! I’d love to learn more about your research and help with ways to best assess the impact of the talent programs! I have a background in education assessment as well!