Basic research is often publicly funded because its very hard for private companies to realize all the gains.
Similarly, rough research ideas, early results, and and novel frames are undersuplied by academia because it is very hard to convert them into legible prestige or realize all the gains.
Lesswrong, the alignment forum, and the AI safety ecosystem have been pretty great at promoting the creation of this kind of work. Even still, I think we should be doing more of it on the current margin.
Concretely, I think MATS should be (marginally more) like “Ink-haven but for alignment effort posts with some experiments” rather than “entrepreneurship incubator” or “ML Research bootcamp”.
Basic research is often publicly funded because its very hard for private companies to realize all the gains.
Similarly, rough research ideas, early results, and and novel frames are undersuplied by academia because it is very hard to convert them into legible prestige or realize all the gains.
Lesswrong, the alignment forum, and the AI safety ecosystem have been pretty great at promoting the creation of this kind of work. Even still, I think we should be doing more of it on the current margin.
Concretely, I think MATS should be (marginally more) like
“Ink-haven but for alignment effort posts with some experiments” rather than “entrepreneurship incubator” or “ML Research bootcamp”.