It’s quite possible that I’m misinterpreting or unintentionally cherry-picking their attitude (I never worked full-time with multiple frontier lab employees in person, and those I did work with I only did so briefly), but I would be somewhat surprised.
does not sound sustainable on the scale of years
I agree, but reading your comment makes me want to read up about burnout amongst people working in order to support an (actual) war effort.
I think it’s entirely possible to enjoy working very hard for research/engineering (including AI safety) and sacrificing other things for it without caring about promotions, status or salary like someone like Paul Erdos, or actually most scientists in academia. I would say it only leads to burnout if you don’t actually enjoy doing all the required work (from prioritization to running the code) and just do it because of guilt or social pressure, or even salary.
Seeing it from the outside, I think this might mostly be a case of seeing people who strongly prefer research over other activities, which can be hard to understand if you don’t share that preference. Aside from that, if AGI/ASI is coming in the next few years, the timescale of the ‘sprint’ is not that long.
It’s quite possible that I’m misinterpreting or unintentionally cherry-picking their attitude (I never worked full-time with multiple frontier lab employees in person, and those I did work with I only did so briefly), but I would be somewhat surprised.
I agree, but reading your comment makes me want to read up about burnout amongst people working in order to support an (actual) war effort.
I think it’s entirely possible to enjoy working very hard for research/engineering (including AI safety) and sacrificing other things for it without caring about promotions, status or salary like someone like Paul Erdos, or actually most scientists in academia. I would say it only leads to burnout if you don’t actually enjoy doing all the required work (from prioritization to running the code) and just do it because of guilt or social pressure, or even salary.
Seeing it from the outside, I think this might mostly be a case of seeing people who strongly prefer research over other activities, which can be hard to understand if you don’t share that preference. Aside from that, if AGI/ASI is coming in the next few years, the timescale of the ‘sprint’ is not that long.
there are multiple ways war mode can go wrong
burnout from lack of purpose (maybe not so likely in this case)
burnout from literal exhaustion (seems quite possible with the indicated amount of work)
loss of slack—working on the apparent most urgent things can lead to the loss of the bigger picture
escalation (at least if the effort is seen as going to capabilities which is maybe less likely here)