Some numbers related to c (how many capabilities researchers):
In 2018 about 8,500 people attended NeurIPS and about 4,000 people attended ICML. There are about 2,000 researchers who work at Google AI, and in December 2017 there were reports that about 700 total people work at DeepMind including about 400 with a PhD.
Turning this into a single estimate for “number of researchers” is tricky for the sorts of reasons that catherio gives. Capabilities researchers is a fuzzy category and it’s not clear to what extent people who are working on advancing the state of the art in general AI capabilities should include people who are primarily working on applications using the current art and people who are primarily working on advancing the state of the art in narrower subfields. Also obviously only some fraction of the relevant researchers attended those conferences or work at those companies.
I’ll suggest 10,000 people as a rough order-of-magnitude estimate. I’d be surprised if the number that came out of a more careful estimation process wasn’t within a factor of ten of that.
(This seems like a reasonable answer for the “number of capabilities researchers” part of the question. Still interested in answers for capabilities funding, safety researchers and safety funding)
Some numbers related to c (how many capabilities researchers):
In 2018 about 8,500 people attended NeurIPS and about 4,000 people attended ICML. There are about 2,000 researchers who work at Google AI, and in December 2017 there were reports that about 700 total people work at DeepMind including about 400 with a PhD.
Turning this into a single estimate for “number of researchers” is tricky for the sorts of reasons that catherio gives. Capabilities researchers is a fuzzy category and it’s not clear to what extent people who are working on advancing the state of the art in general AI capabilities should include people who are primarily working on applications using the current art and people who are primarily working on advancing the state of the art in narrower subfields. Also obviously only some fraction of the relevant researchers attended those conferences or work at those companies.
I’ll suggest 10,000 people as a rough order-of-magnitude estimate. I’d be surprised if the number that came out of a more careful estimation process wasn’t within a factor of ten of that.
Thanks!
(This seems like a reasonable answer for the “number of capabilities researchers” part of the question. Still interested in answers for capabilities funding, safety researchers and safety funding)