Unfortunately I think it takes more like a career than a year to do one clearly legibly impressive thing. If you’re brilliant you can do something marginally legibly impressive in a year, but it’s going to be pretty subjective. So more like ten years to do clearly impressive stuff and even then the value of your illegible work will be highly debatable.
This is a big issue in alignment. Doing work that’s verifiably progress gives much more immediate rewards than actually trying to solve the very complex overall problem. So it’s hard to blame people for mostly searching under the steetlight in alignment.
Unfortunately I think it takes more like a career than a year to do one clearly legibly impressive thing. If you’re brilliant you can do something marginally legibly impressive in a year, but it’s going to be pretty subjective. So more like ten years to do clearly impressive stuff and even then the value of your illegible work will be highly debatable.
This is a big issue in alignment. Doing work that’s verifiably progress gives much more immediate rewards than actually trying to solve the very complex overall problem. So it’s hard to blame people for mostly searching under the steetlight in alignment.