Ryan Kidd: evaluation

Transcript context

…And if you don't like doing that, you're not going to like working with Neil anyway, I would imagine. Yeah, definitely, definitely the case. I do think it is, it's unfortunate that there aren't like easy ways to do credit assignment cheaply, right? To find the best people without them spending a bunch of time. But I don't know, like I know that job interviews for top tech companies like OpenAI Anthropic and GDM just the last like three to six months or something, like you just, like you've had so many things to do before you get finally the yes or no. So we definitely aren't that involved. It's a much slower process. And I think that's because the commitment is less on our end. We're not giving people W-2s. MATS is an independent research program. They get grants from a third party. We provide the housing, the office, the mentorship community, but we don't sign people on for any type of employment, which I think is part of the appeal as well. So that's the main statistic there, 7%. At the other end, about 75% of our accepted fellows go on to our extension phase. So our first three-month program, 7% get in, 75% go on for another six months, maybe even 12 months in some cases. And that extension phase is where a lot of great follow-up research happens. And of the people who've done our program over history, we've had 446 fellows in total. not including people who've done training programs that we've helped facilitate, of which there are probably another like 2, 300. Of those 446, 80% have gone on to get permanent jobs in AI safety based on our latest statistics. So that's great. I think, yeah, like I think 98% are employed in some capacity. Now, of those 80%, not all are like W-2s, right? Some of them are independent researchers with grant funding from coefficient giving or LTFF or something, which I think is like a fine situation, right? And then in terms of like the actual field growth, there's some statistics I can share. So it seems like based on Stephen McElise's Less Wrong investigation, that something like the growth rate of the AI safety field is extra 25% per year, which is kind of interesting, right? It does seem to be growing exponentially as far as we can tell. Now, that is a lot less than the growth rate of Matt's applications, which are going up somewhere between 1.4 to 1.7x per year, depending upon how you slice it. And mentor applications might be increasing around 1.5x per year. So there's a big disconnect. And according to Blue dot Impact, I believe that their growth rate is something like 370% per year in terms of applications to their programs. So there's like, yeah, some large disconnect. So a lot of people are applying to Blue dot. That can't go on, you know, at that rate. That's just way too fast. But probably because they've done amazing advertising and marketing stuff. Matt's has only just started to do advertising and marketing. We had the first ever mentor open round of applications launched just recently. And yeah, we sponsored NeurIPS. That was cool. ting stuff. Matt's has only just started to do advertising and marketing. We had the first ever mentor open round of applications launched just recently. And yeah, we sponsored NeurIPS. That was cool. And we sponsored your podcast and several other great, great venues as well. And I think that this is only going to cause probably the application trend to, to continue. I would say, I would guess 1.5 X per year, something like that, which that is a faster growth rate than the current deployed growth rate of the field. As to why I could speculate it's probably just caused by like, like a high bar, a very high bar for a lot of these companies, maybe a deficit of founders as well. And there are plenty of organizations working to remedy that. I know there was this AI assurance technology report from Juniper Ventures about a year ago where they predicted that the size of the market for AI assurance technologies is doubling each year. So there is a lot of opportunity to do stuff that might contribute to AI safety.…

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