What an impressive group of people. It is reassuring to see that there are people like this with so much talent and such a range of skills wanting to transition into AI Safety or move to more impactful roles.
I wonder ... if these 10 people, or some of them, were to get together, maybe recruit a couple more for specific roles, what would they do that might make them eligible for a Tailwind grant from Coefficient Giving.
For example: right now the biggest question in AI Safety is about how to align the US and China on slowing down - which involves a lot of strategy and influencing and policy, but also some technical questions about verification, and communication.
Hoping against hope that the GOP gets trounced in the mid-terms, by January there should be a chance to have serious discussions with China despite Trump. What might a group of people like this do that would enable that or give it the best chance of success?
You have people from US / Europe / UK / China. You have people interested in policy and people with technical experience. Even if it were just a short-term collaboration, it could be a stepping stone into other AIS fields.
Context here: I see so many people fighting for very few roles in AI Safety. And at the same time, there is a lot of funding for new AI Safety orgs. So what does it take to put a group of very talented, passionate people like this and turn them into a funded AI Safety org working on a critical problem?
IMHO (but I could be wrong), there probably are gaps for people with generalist / org skills - how to manage budgets and how to set up companies and how to coach / train and how to lead long-term research projects - but there are lots of generalists like these looking to work in AI Safety - maybe instead of the usual model where you start with generalists and recruit the technical people, there's a way for the technical people to set up, get funding, and then go recruit some generalists ...
(if people are interested, I'm broadly happy to help with funding applications, a very tedious but critical tasks, maybe the bottleneck).
thanks for this comment!! forgot to mention that i posted a link to it in the context week slack and made a thread for interested folks to coordinate on this -- who knows, maybe some of them will end up co-founding something! :)
I've also recently shared a similar idea about founding with a group of Talos Fellowship fellows - I am one of them. This is a fellowship looking at influencing EU policy to enhance AI Governance. 43 people signed up for what was going to be a simple chat ... so there is definitely both interest and potential. I will keep pushing it.
edit: this seems like a very useful thing for a platform like wat Denis is saying where you have a database of people trying to work in this field, their skills, seems like something very useful for project team leaders and stuff if you just automate the search, I wonder if this already exists and it kind of does with Linkdin but at the same time, I don't know if there is much guarantee of quality on linkdin it makes me want to make an EA app for employers where I describe people just as you have like match attacks or a fantasy football team for team assembly in a project, wht do u think?
hey!! this seems kind of similar to http://aisafetyfounders.com/, but that site seems more startup focused / not sure if there are directories like this for founding orgs in particular. could be an interesting side project, or maybe just a nudge to the people running AI Safety Founders to also include org co-founding matching?
What an impressive group of people. It is reassuring to see that there are people like this with so much talent and such a range of skills wanting to transition into AI Safety or move to more impactful roles.
I wonder ... if these 10 people, or some of them, were to get together, maybe recruit a couple more for specific roles, what would they do that might make them eligible for a Tailwind grant from Coefficient Giving.
For example: right now the biggest question in AI Safety is about how to align the US and China on slowing down - which involves a lot of strategy and influencing and policy, but also some technical questions about verification, and communication.
Hoping against hope that the GOP gets trounced in the mid-terms, by January there should be a chance to have serious discussions with China despite Trump. What might a group of people like this do that would enable that or give it the best chance of success?
You have people from US / Europe / UK / China. You have people interested in policy and people with technical experience. Even if it were just a short-term collaboration, it could be a stepping stone into other AIS fields.
Context here: I see so many people fighting for very few roles in AI Safety. And at the same time, there is a lot of funding for new AI Safety orgs. So what does it take to put a group of very talented, passionate people like this and turn them into a funded AI Safety org working on a critical problem?
IMHO (but I could be wrong), there probably are gaps for people with generalist / org skills - how to manage budgets and how to set up companies and how to coach / train and how to lead long-term research projects - but there are lots of generalists like these looking to work in AI Safety - maybe instead of the usual model where you start with generalists and recruit the technical people, there's a way for the technical people to set up, get funding, and then go recruit some generalists ...
(if people are interested, I'm broadly happy to help with funding applications, a very tedious but critical tasks, maybe the bottleneck).
thanks for this comment!! forgot to mention that i posted a link to it in the context week slack and made a thread for interested folks to coordinate on this -- who knows, maybe some of them will end up co-founding something! :)
I've also recently shared a similar idea about founding with a group of Talos Fellowship fellows - I am one of them. This is a fellowship looking at influencing EU policy to enhance AI Governance. 43 people signed up for what was going to be a simple chat ... so there is definitely both interest and potential. I will keep pushing it.
yooo jack my goat too
edit: this seems like a very useful thing for a platform like wat Denis is saying where you have a database of people trying to work in this field, their skills, seems like something very useful for project team leaders and stuff if you just automate the search, I wonder if this already exists and it kind of does with Linkdin but at the same time, I don't know if there is much guarantee of quality on linkdin it makes me want to make an EA app for employers where I describe people just as you have like match attacks or a fantasy football team for team assembly in a project, wht do u think?
hey!! this seems kind of similar to http://aisafetyfounders.com/, but that site seems more startup focused / not sure if there are directories like this for founding orgs in particular. could be an interesting side project, or maybe just a nudge to the people running AI Safety Founders to also include org co-founding matching?
(also you're the goat zebedi <3)
you're the goat
Yeah I'm looking at it seems similar but missing that key feature, I'll go nudge them for now