One small thought is that things end up feeling extremely neglected once you index on particular subquestions. Like, on a high-level, it is indeed the case that AI safety has gotten more mainstream.
But when you zoom in, there are a lot of very important topics that have <5 people seriously working on them. I work in AI policy, so I’m more familiar with the policy/governance ones but I imagine this is also true in technical (also, maybe consider swapping to governance/policy!)
Also, especially in hype waves, I think a lot of people end up just working on the popular thing. If you’re willing to deviate from the popular thing, you can often find important parts of the problem that nearly no one is addressing.
Thanks for sharing your experience here.
One small thought is that things end up feeling extremely neglected once you index on particular subquestions. Like, on a high-level, it is indeed the case that AI safety has gotten more mainstream.
But when you zoom in, there are a lot of very important topics that have <5 people seriously working on them. I work in AI policy, so I’m more familiar with the policy/governance ones but I imagine this is also true in technical (also, maybe consider swapping to governance/policy!)
Also, especially in hype waves, I think a lot of people end up just working on the popular thing. If you’re willing to deviate from the popular thing, you can often find important parts of the problem that nearly no one is addressing.