My guess at what’s happening here: for the first iterations of MATS (think MATS 2.0 at the Lightcone WeWork) you would have folks who were already into AI Safety for quite a long time and were interested in doing some form of internship-like thing for a summer. But as you run more cohorts (and make the cohorts bigger) then the density of people who have been interested in safety for a long time naturally decreases (because all the people who were interested in safety for years already applied to previous iterations).
My guess at what’s happening here: for the first iterations of MATS (think MATS 2.0 at the Lightcone WeWork) you would have folks who were already into AI Safety for quite a long time and were interested in doing some form of internship-like thing for a summer. But as you run more cohorts (and make the cohorts bigger) then the density of people who have been interested in safety for a long time naturally decreases (because all the people who were interested in safety for years already applied to previous iterations).