AIS student, you can be an IC

[crossposted from Substack]

Individual Contributor (IC): an employee who performs tasks and contributes to the company’s goals without having direct reports or managerial responsibilities

In the AI Safety context¹:

IC: a student who does research / direct work without being an AIS student group organizer

I think there’s a good pipeline of support and community for student organizers² but basically ~nothing specifically for student ICs³.

This is a shame, because I think focusing on research / actually doing things without managing people can be really cool. Here are some reasons:

1. You get more time to focus on your work
2. You can get up to speed faster in the time you’d otherwise spend wrangling venues and budgets and Airtables
3. By focusing on domain interests rather than broad-church ones, you’re more likely to be pushing frontiers by the time you graduate
4. You can spend more time talking to / collaborating with peers outside your college who are closer in interest-space to you:

Here are my recommendations for an aspiring student IC:

• Conferences (EAGs, NeurIPS, …) to meet other IC-like people
• Join an academic lab at your college and spend time there
• Hackathons, like those run by Apart
• SPAR / MARS / etc⁴
• Blog! Like Jason on AI policy. Reply with other active, AIS-focused student blogs to be added here :)

I’m writing this post because if you’re just getting into AIS, starting / joining a student group might seem like an obvious way to get more involved in the ecosystem, pursue your burgeoning interest, find likeminded people, etc.. But it could hold you back.

I once talked to an Ivy League student group organizer who didn’t know a classmate from their college who published with GPI and went to work at OpenAI.⁵ This seems like one case where the ICs and the student group organizers were pretty distant, with the ICs doing higher-leverage things.

If you’re a student doing or considering the IC path, please get in touch! We should map and live in interest-space. If 2+ people message me, I’ll make a group chat for people explicitly focused on prioritizing this path. (which I would then have to either leave or put an AI in charge of(?), because anything else would make me an AIS student group organizer, which I have no interest in being).

1

Note that you can swap out ‘AIS’ for ‘EA’ in most of the above and it stands, or indeed many other group types.

2

e.g. Pathfinder, fellowship for AIS student group organizers ft. funding, mentorship, & community, or OASIS, the workshop for AIS student group organizers. These initiatives have shifted from OP to Kairos. I’m glad they exist!

3

If an org like OP/Kairos wanted to gather the ICs, I tentatively think that could be cool & boost the number of people following the path, but also maybe outside the spirit of the thing. Non-student-specific, domain-specific gatherings ought to be sufficient.

4

Also, if you’re saving time not wrangling venues and budgets and Airtables, you may develop enough expertise to become a mentor in one of these programs.

5

not leopold, another one