My impression is that the majority of the benefit from having professors working on AI safety is in mentorship to students who are already interested in AI safety, rather than recruitment. For example, I have heard that David Krueger’s lab is mostly people who went to Cambridge specifically to work on AI safety under him. If that’s the case, there’s less value in working at a school with generally talented students but more value in schools with a supportive environment.
In general it’s good to recognize that what matters to AI safety professors is different than what matters to many other CS professors and that optimizing for the same thing other PhD students are is suboptimal. However, as Lawrence pointed out, it’s already a rare case to have offers from multiple top schools, and even rarer not have one offer dominate the others under both sets of values. It’s a more relevant consideration for incoming PhD students, where multiple good offers is more common.
I also like that your analysis can flow in reverse. Not all AI safety professors are in their schools CS faculties, with Jacob Steinhardt and Victor Veitch coming to mind as examples in their schools’ statistics faculties. For PhD students outside CS, the schools you identified as overachievers make excellent targets. On a personal note, that was an important factor in deciding to do my PhD.
My impression is that the majority of the benefit from having professors working on AI safety is in mentorship to students who are already interested in AI safety, rather than recruitment. For example, I have heard that David Krueger’s lab is mostly people who went to Cambridge specifically to work on AI safety under him. If that’s the case, there’s less value in working at a school with generally talented students but more value in schools with a supportive environment.
In general it’s good to recognize that what matters to AI safety professors is different than what matters to many other CS professors and that optimizing for the same thing other PhD students are is suboptimal. However, as Lawrence pointed out, it’s already a rare case to have offers from multiple top schools, and even rarer not have one offer dominate the others under both sets of values. It’s a more relevant consideration for incoming PhD students, where multiple good offers is more common.
I also like that your analysis can flow in reverse. Not all AI safety professors are in their schools CS faculties, with Jacob Steinhardt and Victor Veitch coming to mind as examples in their schools’ statistics faculties. For PhD students outside CS, the schools you identified as overachievers make excellent targets. On a personal note, that was an important factor in deciding to do my PhD.