I have met somewhere between 100-200 AI Safety people in the past ~2 years; people for whom AI Safety is their ‘main thing’.
The vast majority of them are doing tractable/legible/comfortable things. Most are surprisingly naive; have less awareness of the space than I do (and I’m just a generalist lurker who finds this stuff interesting; not actively working on the problem).
Few are actually staring into the void of the hard problems; where hard here is loosely defined as ‘unknown unknowns, here be dragons, where do I even start’.
Fewer still progress from staring into the void to actually trying things.
I think some amount of this is natural and to be expected; I think even in an ideal world we probably still have a similar breakdown—a majority who aren’t contributing (yet)[1], a minority who are—and I think the difference is more in the size of those groups.
I think it’s reasonable to aim for a larger, higher quality, minority; I think it’s tractable to achieve progress through mindfully shaping the funding landscape.
Think it’s worth mentioning that all newbies are useless, and not all newbies remain newbies. Some portion of the majority are actually people who will progress to being useful after they’ve gained experience and wisdom.
it’s tractable to achieve progress through mindfully shaping the funding landscape
This isn’t clear to me, where the crux (though maybe it shouldn’t be) is “is it feasible for any substantial funders to distinguish actually-trying research from other”.
To the extent that anecdata is meaningful:
I have met somewhere between 100-200 AI Safety people in the past ~2 years; people for whom AI Safety is their ‘main thing’.
The vast majority of them are doing tractable/legible/comfortable things. Most are surprisingly naive; have less awareness of the space than I do (and I’m just a generalist lurker who finds this stuff interesting; not actively working on the problem).
Few are actually staring into the void of the hard problems; where hard here is loosely defined as ‘unknown unknowns, here be dragons, where do I even start’.
Fewer still progress from staring into the void to actually trying things.
I think some amount of this is natural and to be expected; I think even in an ideal world we probably still have a similar breakdown—a majority who aren’t contributing (yet)[1], a minority who are—and I think the difference is more in the size of those groups.
I think it’s reasonable to aim for a larger, higher quality, minority; I think it’s tractable to achieve progress through mindfully shaping the funding landscape.
Think it’s worth mentioning that all newbies are useless, and not all newbies remain newbies. Some portion of the majority are actually people who will progress to being useful after they’ve gained experience and wisdom.
This isn’t clear to me, where the crux (though maybe it shouldn’t be) is “is it feasible for any substantial funders to distinguish actually-trying research from other”.