Yes, I would generally support picking the latter as they have a “faster time to mentorship/research leadership/impact” and the field seems currently bottlenecked on mentorship and research leads, not marginal engineers (though individual research leads might feel bottlenecked on marginal engineers).
We should prioritize people who already have research or engineering experience or a very high iteration speed as we are operating under time constraints; AGI is coming soon. Additionally, I think “research taste” will be more important than engineering ability given AI automation and this takes a long time to build; better to select people with existing research experience they can adapt from another field (also promotes interdisciplinary knowledge transfer).
Yes, I would generally support picking the latter as they have a “faster time to mentorship/research leadership/impact” and the field seems currently bottlenecked on mentorship and research leads, not marginal engineers (though individual research leads might feel bottlenecked on marginal engineers).
We should prioritize people who already have research or engineering experience or a very high iteration speed as we are operating under time constraints; AGI is coming soon. Additionally, I think “research taste” will be more important than engineering ability given AI automation and this takes a long time to build; better to select people with existing research experience they can adapt from another field (also promotes interdisciplinary knowledge transfer).
I talk more about it here.