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In some discussions I had with people at EAG it was interesting to discover that there might be a significant lack of EA-aligned people in the hardware-space of AI, which seems to translate towards difficulties in getting industry contacts for co-development of hardware-level AI safety measures. To the degree to which there are EA members in these companies, it might make sense to create some kind of communication space to exchange ideas between people working on hardware AI safety with people at hardware-relevant companies (think Broadcomm, Samsung, Nvidia, GloFo, Tsmc etc). Unfortunately I feel that culturally these spaces (EEng/CE) are not very transmissible to EA-ideas and the boom in ML/AI has caused significant self-selection of people towards hotter topics.
I believe there might be significant benefit for accelerating realistic safety designs, if discussions can be moved into industry as fast as possible.
I'd be pretty excited about 80k trying to do something useful here; unsure if it'd work, but I think we could be well-placed. Would you be up for talking with me about it? Seems like you have relevant context about these folks. Please email me if so at bella@80000hours.org :D
Unfortunately I feel that culturally these spaces (EEng/CE) are not very transmissible to EA-ideas and the boom in ML/AI has caused significant self-selection of people towards hotter topics.
Fwiw I have some EEE background from undergrad and I spend some time doing fieldbuilding with this crowd and I think a lack of effort on outreach is more predictive of the lack of relevant people at say EAGs as opposed to AI risk messaging not landing well with this crowd.
I'd be pretty excited about 80k trying to do something useful here; unsure if it'd work, but I think we could be well-placed. Would you be up for talking with me about it? Seems like you have relevant context about these folks. Please email me if so at bella@80000hours.org :D