most academic research work is done by grad students, and grad students need incremental, legible wins to put on their CV so they can prove they are capable of doing research. this has to happen pretty fast. an ML grad student who hasn’t contributed to any top conference papers by their second or third year in grad school might get pulled aside for a talk about their future.
ideally you want a topic where you can go from zero to paper in less than a year, with multiple opportunities for followup work. get a few such projects going and you have a very strong chance of getting at least one through in time to not get managed out of your program—and of course, usually more will succeed and you’ll be doing great.
I don’t think there’s anything like this in AI safety research. Section 3.4 seems to acknowledge this a little bit. If you want AI safety to become more popular, you’d hope that an incoming PhD student could say “I want to work on AI Safety” and be confident that in a year or two, they’ll have a finished research project that they can claim as a success and submit to a top venue. Otherwise, they are taking a pretty huge career risk, and most people won’t take it.
most academic research work is done by grad students, and grad students need incremental, legible wins to put on their CV so they can prove they are capable of doing research. this has to happen pretty fast. an ML grad student who hasn’t contributed to any top conference papers by their second or third year in grad school might get pulled aside for a talk about their future.
ideally you want a topic where you can go from zero to paper in less than a year, with multiple opportunities for followup work. get a few such projects going and you have a very strong chance of getting at least one through in time to not get managed out of your program—and of course, usually more will succeed and you’ll be doing great.
I don’t think there’s anything like this in AI safety research. Section 3.4 seems to acknowledge this a little bit. If you want AI safety to become more popular, you’d hope that an incoming PhD student could say “I want to work on AI Safety” and be confident that in a year or two, they’ll have a finished research project that they can claim as a success and submit to a top venue. Otherwise, they are taking a pretty huge career risk, and most people won’t take it.