In a world where AI safety is well funded, every AI safety organization would be trying to hire him.
Funding is not literally the only constraint; organizations can also have limited staff time to spread across hiring, onboarding, mentoring, and hopefully also doing the work the organization exists to do! Scaling up very quickly, or moderately far, also has a tendency to destroy the culture of organizations and induce communications problems at best or moral mazes at worst.
Unfortunately “just throw money at smart people to work independently” also requires a bunch of vetting, or the field collapses as an ocean of sincere incompetents and outright grifters drown out the people doing useful work.
That said, here are a couple of things for your son—or others in similar positions—to try:
Write up a proposed independent project, then email some funders about a summer project grant. Think “implement a small GPT or Efficient-Zero, apply it to a small domain like two-digit arithmetic, and investigate a restricted version of a real problem (in interpretability, generalization, prosaic alignment, etc)
You don’t need anyone’s permission to just do the project! Funding can make it easier to spend a lot of time on it, but doing much smaller projects in your free time is a great way to demonstrate that you’re fundable or hirable.
Funding is not literally the only constraint; organizations can also have limited staff time to spread across hiring, onboarding, mentoring, and hopefully also doing the work the organization exists to do! Scaling up very quickly, or moderately far, also has a tendency to destroy the culture of organizations and induce communications problems at best or moral mazes at worst.
Unfortunately “just throw money at smart people to work independently” also requires a bunch of vetting, or the field collapses as an ocean of sincere incompetents and outright grifters drown out the people doing useful work.
That said, here are a couple of things for your son—or others in similar positions—to try:
https://www.redwoodresearch.org/jobs (or https://www.anthropic.com/#careers, though we don’t have internships)
Write up a proposed independent project, then email some funders about a summer project grant. Think “implement a small GPT or Efficient-Zero, apply it to a small domain like two-digit arithmetic, and investigate a restricted version of a real problem (in interpretability, generalization, prosaic alignment, etc)
You don’t need anyone’s permission to just do the project! Funding can make it easier to spend a lot of time on it, but doing much smaller projects in your free time is a great way to demonstrate that you’re fundable or hirable.