A proposed strategy to attract competent, experienced talent
Thank you to Roman at Constellation for reminding me that I had a draft on this, and Denis for the comment that inspired it!
Pictured: Mid-career professional transitioning into AI safety. Left: original career; middle: fellowships; right: full-time AI safety position.
AI safety has a problem. As I wrote about in my previous post, we’re very talent constrained:
Currently, there are roughly 1,100 to a few thousand people working on existential risks from AI. For comparison, 80,000 Hours writes that “[the] Nature Conservancy alone has 3,000–4,000 employees… the World Health Organisation [also] employs over 8,000 people.”
At the same time, I’ve heard countless stories of mid-career professionals wanting to break into the space and struggling to do so. What gives?
This post argues three things:
- AI safety should proactively recruit mid-career professionals (hereafter MCPs).
- Our main on-ramps, fellowships built for entry-level talent, fail them.
- A workshop → grant → founder-matching pipeline would be a good start.
Why should we target mid-career professionals?
- Mid-career professionals have valuable skills and years of experience. They just need to be upskilled on the AI safety component, which I believe could be done to a reasonable degree with maybe a week’s worth of reading and a weekend-long workshop.
- With a proven body of work to judge, we don’t have to wait for applications – we can spot the people we want and recruit them directly, with high confidence they’ll be good.
- MCPs are uniquely positioned to fill the roles AI safety needs most – comms, ops, management (see: AI safety is bottlenecked on generalists) – because they have years of experience doing exactly these jobs.
Why current on-ramps fail
- Fellowships are the main on-ramp, and they’re optimized for entry-level talent for a reason – it’s a bit unreasonable to ask someone established to quit their job, take a massive pay cut, and join a weird three-month thing with no guarantee of a stable job on the other side.
- I like BlueDot’s Career Transition Grants, but they’re most effective when paired with something that gets people involved in the space in the first place.
- We can’t just wait for MCPs to stumble on a Rob Miles video, decide to upend their years-long careers, and apply for a career transition grant! The grant funds the transition; something else has to spark it.
- Currently, the closest thing to an on-ramp designed specifically for MCPs is maybe Lateral Workshop, but as far as I know, it’s never run before and may never run again. As a result, I don’t know very much about it, but I’m excited about its premise.
- In the future, if it does run again, I think it should try actively headhunting promising MCP talent rather than waiting on applicants.
What I am bullish on: A new founder pipeline for mid-career professionals
Here’s an on-ramp that I think might work:
- Step one: more Praxis-like events.
- Praxis, organized by Chanden Climaco (Generator Residency) and Saul Munn, took champion debaters and acquainted them with AI safety. There was no application process – the organizers reached out to talented debaters in their networks (both having debated in high school) and invited them directly. Attendees got some amount of pre-reading (AI 2027, among other things), then two days of talks and discussions with speakers from the field. And now, Chanden, Saul, and others are hand-holding interested participants through application processes and pointing them at specific ways into the field.
- This is exactly the strategy I’m bullish on! Headhunt by track record, spark with a short intensive, then guide the transition.
- Can we do this for mathematicians? Physicists? Comms professionals?
- Step two: BlueDot career transition grants (or CG transition grants) for the workshop participants who decide to pivot.
- The workshop sparks the transition; the grant funds it, and (perhaps more importantly) it’s also a signal: there is a place for you here, and people willing to back you. Remember who we’re asking – people succeeding in high-paying careers, being told to trade certainty for a weird niche field they learned about at a weekend workshop. That’s a big ask. Every ounce of friction and doubt you can remove matters.
- Step three: founder matching and high-level hiring coordination. We’ll try to pair you, a strong executor, with a team of aligned advisors or an aligned cofounder to execute on a vision (see my piece on optimizing the grantmaking process by separating strategic taste and execution ability)
- (Another thing that we could do for MCPs: reverse headhunting, as I’ve proposed for fellowships)
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Design notes from me
The goal of these workshops is simple: participants should leave wanting to join the field. Everything else is downstream of that, which has two implications:
- Cover the field wide, not deep. Structure the program around several sub-areas – loss of control, misuse, AI-enabled biorisk, AI economics – because different things convince different people.
- If a participant doesn’t care about technical alignment and the whole workshop is about technical alignment, they leave as someone who doesn’t care about the field. Give them one talk on alignment and one on biorisk, and they might leave a bit freaked out about smallpox!
- Skip minutiae, e.g. the camps. It’s tempting to brief participants on the field’s internal debates – who believes what, which disagreements influence different approaches. Resist it. A participant who leaves motivated will go learn the camps on their own; the nuance about the field can all come later.
Final note
There has never been a better time for this. After the Hugging Face hack, more people are interested in AI safety than ever before. We need to be able to receive them.
POV: the field of AI safety (Constellation is like Disneyland but better)
Edit to add more resources for MCPs (h/t Robyn from the MATS Slack):
If you’d like to be connected to the Praxis team, reach out and I can connect you! Alternatively, you can find their contact info at the bottom of their website. They’re keen to chat with funders and grantmakers to discuss scaling this approach.
One of the initial issues you listed was that mid-career people wanted to get in but couldn't, and that got me excited, because I am one of those people who has basically decided I don't have the ability to do the transition (because I can't/won't move, don't have the credentials, and can't afford the pay cut to take a more junior role).
But the solution you proposed, unless I'm misunderstanding it, doesn't help me at all. It seems like your main proposal is that AI safety should actively recruit mid-career people whom it thinks are likely to be highly talented at these more generic roles, rather than trying to home-grow them out of freshers, who are comparatively rare and inexperienced.
Which is fine and maybe reasonable, depending on just how much AI safety needs sort of generic mid-career people who are loosely informed on AI safety.
I also think, inasmuch as you indicated initially that a lot of mid-career people want in and can't get in, that seems to suggest that the need for mid-career people is a bit overstated or at least under-specified—it seems like the mid-career people who are needed are not just any mid-career people, but people with some specific set of traits. This is further supported by the fact that you suggested recruiting champion debaters was a good idea (to be clear, I'm not saying it is a bad idea). Champion debaters like this are not just any mid-career people, that's a pretty specialized group. Same thing goes for mathematicians and physicists TBH.
Hi Craig! I think you brought up some really good points re: what this piece covers vs doesn't. I wrote this piece with mainly MCPs who have some number of the following problems in mind:
The solution I proposed was:
I understand it was probably confusing for me to have gone from MCPs struggling to get in to a model that, via headhunting, seemed to imply that we should prioritize getting the most talented MCPs to transition in (via e.g. educating them about AI risk).
To clarify, I included the headhunting aspect because these kinds of programs usually have applications open by default rather than inviting people, but I think it may be worth doing both (e.g. I think versions of Lateral Workshop that are invite-based for mathematicians should exist, but in an ideal world there should also be general versions of Lateral Workshop that run the normal application process). Either that, or the active headhunters running these programs would hopefully have MCPs who are / have struggled to transition in in the past on their radars, so the workshops would serve both types of MCPs -- those trying to transition and those not really having considered it strongly.
I also:
in which case, I think a workshop like this which also walks through applying for career transition grants would be pretty helpful.
So you’re right that the pipeline doesn’t solve your specific case; remote-friendly roles and compensation are field-level problems that I didn't try to tackle in this post, because I'm honestly not sure how to. What I’d say is the pipeline shrinks the population of blocked MCPs to the more difficult structural cases like yours, which, although not perfect, is progress over the current state of affairs.
Hope that clarifies things -- let me know your thoughts!
I think that, given the compensation and in-office expectations, head hunting talent that is not already motivated to work on this issue is unlikely to be super effective, especially given the requisite resource commitment on the part of the head hunters to identify prospects. You'd be soliciting people to change into a new career based on an issue they thus far have not been personally identified with despite the uncertainty around the career and respective decrease in benefits. Maybe there is a way to sort of flash motivate them, such as by your workshop proposal. But this still is pretty resource intensive—you have to put on a workshop, lots will say no, since you are providing significant financial support to those who say yes, you basically need to pre-vet them, etc.
But maybe there are some low-hanging fruit in terms of easily convinced people out there who are also obviously great fits, and you just need to get them to a workshop, but I doubt there are many such cases.
Tracking and supporting people who are desirous to switch into the field but thus far have been unsuccessful is not a bad idea, but comparatively, its probably not that much more effective than just hiring more junior people and letting them build up experience, and of course, hiring juniors immediately is cheaper and lets you get something right away. My feeling is that this actually kind of explains the current state of affairs (from an outsider's perspective)—realistically, keeping up with middling mid-career candidates of ambiguous potential and supporting them through the transition probably never seems worth it compared to investing in highly talented junior people who will probably become highly effective. At any rate, the signal is way stronger from the juniors, and you never even know for sure if the mid-career people will actually make the change even if given the chance.
TBH, this is all well outside my own domain of expertise.