I’m saying that AI Safety really can’t take off as a field in China without a cadre of well-paid people working on technical alignment. If people were working on, say, interpretability work here for a high wage ($50,000-$100,000 is considered a lot for a PHD in the field), it would gain prestige and people would take it seriously. Otherwise it just sounds like LARP. That’s how you do field building in China. You don’t go around making speeches, you hire people.
My gut feeling is that hiring 10 expats in Beijing to do “field building” gets less field building done than hiring 10 college grads in Shanghai to do technical alignment work.
I’m saying that AI Safety really can’t take off as a field in China without a cadre of well-paid people working on technical alignment. If people were working on, say, interpretability work here for a high wage ($50,000-$100,000 is considered a lot for a PHD in the field), it would gain prestige and people would take it seriously. Otherwise it just sounds like LARP. That’s how you do field building in China. You don’t go around making speeches, you hire people.
My gut feeling is that hiring 10 expats in Beijing to do “field building” gets less field building done than hiring 10 college grads in Shanghai to do technical alignment work.