Interesting. Do you have the stats for the rate of growth in the number of mentors meeting your bar (ignoring capacity constraints, ie that you think would be a good mentor)? I’m surprised the rate of growth there is higher and I’m not sure if this is MATS becoming higher profile and drawing in more existing mentors, more people who are not suitable for being a mentor applying or AI safety actually making progress on the mentorship bottleneck
This is a hard question to answer precisely, as we have changed the metrics by which we have evaluated potential mentors several times. The average quality of mentors we accept has grown each program, by my lights. I weakly think that the average quality of mentors applying has also grown, though much slower.
I think that the distribution of mentors we are drawing from is slowing growing to include more highly respected academics and industry professionals by percentage. I think this increases the average quality of our mentor applicant pool, but I understand that this is might be controversial. Note that I still think our most impactful mentors are well-known within the AI safety field and most of the top-50 most impactful researchers in AI safety apply to mentor at MATS.
Interesting. Do you have the stats for the rate of growth in the number of mentors meeting your bar (ignoring capacity constraints, ie that you think would be a good mentor)? I’m surprised the rate of growth there is higher and I’m not sure if this is MATS becoming higher profile and drawing in more existing mentors, more people who are not suitable for being a mentor applying or AI safety actually making progress on the mentorship bottleneck
This is a hard question to answer precisely, as we have changed the metrics by which we have evaluated potential mentors several times. The average quality of mentors we accept has grown each program, by my lights. I weakly think that the average quality of mentors applying has also grown, though much slower.
I think that the distribution of mentors we are drawing from is slowing growing to include more highly respected academics and industry professionals by percentage. I think this increases the average quality of our mentor applicant pool, but I understand that this is might be controversial. Note that I still think our most impactful mentors are well-known within the AI safety field and most of the top-50 most impactful researchers in AI safety apply to mentor at MATS.