Ryan Kidd: belief

Transcript context

…What does the salary distribution look like for the people that are getting jobs, like how much of an alignment tax? If any, do people pay in the salary department? I mean, at the Frontier Labs, no tax at all. They're getting paid the same rates if you're leading. Yeah, they're getting staggering amounts of money. I think like a couple of years ago, the going rate for like someone joining off the street was like 370 K. or something. I'm sure it's much higher now, especially with the crazy meta stuff that happened. I would bet mid-level and higher people are making over a million, even on the safety teams of these labs, but I don't have any private data on that. But yeah, if you join as a junior software engineer, don't be surprised if you get somewhere around 350k or something. At nonprofits, obviously, it's lower, right? They can't compete with equity. They don't have any equity, but they also typically have all less funding. You know, coefficient giving's pockets aren't as deep as the collective might of US venture capitalism. And I think there is also something like, there is something like a nonprofit tax. I wouldn't say there's a safety tax. I'll say there's a nonprofit tax, right? Because there are nonprofits that are doing like AI capabilities stuff like Allen Institute for AI. People make a lot of money still. Right. There's like, this is, this is artificial intelligence, right? And Coefficient Giving understands and other funders understand that, you know, you have to pay to play. So you have organizations like Meter that where they are, I believe, offering quite a lot of money for their roles. Upwards of 300K for, for most roles. Like, yeah. probably over a million for some, I would dare say. So there are nonprofits that are really, really trying to compete for talent. They can't offer anything like the Frontier Labs salaries, including equity, but they're trying their best. And I think this is kind of reasonable, but it also is a bit of an insane moment. Matt's salaries are not anywhere near that high. Maybe we're doing the wrong thing. I don't know. Yeah, and I think there are other AI safety nonprofits that have tried very different strategies. Like you have I think the going rate for far AI's research scientists are something like 100, 170K, so significantly lower. They might have actually improved that recently. So there is a wide spectrum here, and it really depends on the compensation policy of the organization. But you will see very well-funded nonprofits offering comparable salaries to at least some junior AI company roles. What about in terms of compute? I know you guys have a, in addition to the stipend that folks get as fellows, there's also a compute grant and I believe it's $12,000 worth of compute. I'm interested in what form that takes. Like, is it just a Brex card that you can go spend on compute wherever you want? Or do you guys have like established compute partners that you work with that, you know, serve your fellows well? How often is that enough? Are there times when people find that they need more compute to do what they want to do? And then if they go work at a nonprofit, like how compute rich or poor are the nonprofits?…

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