I added a new section in the introduction named ‘Definitions’ to define some commonly-used terms in the post and decrease ambiguity. To answer your question, research engineers and research scientists would be in the technical AI safety research category.
I re-estimating the number of researchers at the organizations you mentioned and came up with the following numbers:
From reading their website, CHAI has a lot graduate students and interns and I would consider them to be full-time researchers. My previous estimate for CHAI is 10-30-60 (low-estimate-high) and I changed it to 5-25-50 in light of this new information. My estimate is less than 40 to be conservative and also because I doubt all of these researchers are working full-time at CHAI. Also, some of them have probably been counted in the Alignment Forum total.
FHI
Information from their website: - AI safety research group: 2 - AI governance researchers: 1 - Research Scholars Programme + DPhil Scholars and Affiliates: 9
- Total: 12
Change in estimate: 10-10-40 → 5-10-30
MIRI - 1 leader (Nate Soares) - 9 research staff
Change in estimate: 10-15-30 → 5-10-20
“Also, I think that every single person I counted above has at least a LessWrong account, and most also have Alignment Forum accounts, so a good chunk are probably double-counted.”
I analyzed the people who posted AI safety posts on LessWrong and found that only 15% also had Alignment Forum accounts. I avoided double-counting by subtracting the LessWrong users who also have an Alignment Forum account from the LessWrong total.
For SERI MATS, I’m guessing that some of those people will be counted in the AF count. I also added an ‘Other’ row for other groups I didn’t include in the table.
I decided to delete the Google Brain and Meta entries because I have very little information about them.
Thanks for the feedback.
I added a new section in the introduction named ‘Definitions’ to define some commonly-used terms in the post and decrease ambiguity. To answer your question, research engineers and research scientists would be in the technical AI safety research category.
I re-estimating the number of researchers at the organizations you mentioned and came up with the following numbers:
CHAI
- 2 researchers
- 6 researchers
- 21 graduate students
- 11 interns
Total: 40
From reading their website, CHAI has a lot graduate students and interns and I would consider them to be full-time researchers. My previous estimate for CHAI is 10-30-60 (low-estimate-high) and I changed it to 5-25-50 in light of this new information. My estimate is less than 40 to be conservative and also because I doubt all of these researchers are working full-time at CHAI. Also, some of them have probably been counted in the Alignment Forum total.
FHI
Information from their website:
- AI safety research group: 2
- AI governance researchers: 1
- Research Scholars Programme + DPhil Scholars and Affiliates: 9
- Total: 12
Change in estimate: 10-10-40 → 5-10-30
MIRI
- 1 leader (Nate Soares)
- 9 research staff
Change in estimate: 10-15-30 → 5-10-20
I analyzed the people who posted AI safety posts on LessWrong and found that only 15% also had Alignment Forum accounts. I avoided double-counting by subtracting the LessWrong users who also have an Alignment Forum account from the LessWrong total.
For SERI MATS, I’m guessing that some of those people will be counted in the AF count. I also added an ‘Other’ row for other groups I didn’t include in the table.
I decided to delete the Google Brain and Meta entries because I have very little information about them.