Hey Valerio,

It's very much possible. What I would say is that you should 1. be realistic about the tradeoffs, 2.  Think about your personal fit for AI, and 3. think about what version of this transition is best for you.

Tradeoffs. 

Career progression. To start with, as with any career switch, you'll be stepping back a couple of years in seniority in order to make it. For the next few years, you'll obviously find it harder to get a job in AI than a job in medicine, even if you study hard. If you want to be a professor, your chance of doing this in AI is simply much lower than your chance of doing this through medicine +/- neuroscience, because you are currently much stronger at the latter (vis CS students who may be writing AI papers since the middle of undergrad), and furthermore, the latter is less competitive, due to medicine being a largely professional field. 

What AI roles look like. In the long-run, working in AI can give you a perfectly competitive salary, compared to medicine, and in some cases a higher one. But the very best roles tend to be in the US, or sometimes the UK, requiring visa applications and waiting periods that can be extremely inconvenient. Also, they are often less secure than a career in medicine. You should also be aware of a common blind spot: as people get older, they care more about the security of their job, and living near their family, or living near where they grew up.

Clear advantages. AI research is far more interesting than being a doctor. The work is much more varied, and people work somewhat less hard. And if you are interested in existential risk, then obviously AI safety research can potentially do something to mitigate this risk in a way that medicine absolutely can't.

Personal fit

The variance in outcomes in an AI career is much more than in medicine. In medicine, it helps a little to be smarter, more conscientious, and more senior, of course. Compared to that, you will notice that in AI (and tech generally), that problem-solving and coding ability is massively important, and can lead to varying outcomes that are way larger than you see in medicine. So before moving into AI, you need to try to be objective and think about it: are you already writing research papers as an undergrad? How is your academic performance? Have you been a mathematics competition kid? Do you want to be in a field that is highly intellectually competitive? Do you find it easy to learn programming, and to build useful demos? Another big element of personal fit is motivation: how much do you care about being involved in interpretability: does it feel like potentially your life cause, or just something that could be nice and interesting. Personally, when I got interested in AI safety, I felt like the former - there was nothing in the world that could convince me away from trying to do something about existential risk. I wanted to try and try until I'd definitively reached a point of failure. If you feel strongly motivated like that, I would definitely recommend you do it, and that's a big consideration.

Thinking through the transition. 

If you want to do it, the sooner you transition, the better you are likely to do. The problem with medicine is that there are always a few more years that you can study, to get slightly more money, and slightly more secure, that realistically will take up a lot of your time, and take away a lot of your ability to do outside activities.

I would say the most plausible options are as follows, in decreasing order of urgency:

1. Quit as soon as you are accepted to a full-time CS degree or AI/EA job
2. Reach a "save-point" at the end of your degree or internship that you can return to, and then (1).
3. MD-> PhD (ideally in something more technical) -> research role
4. (Don't do it)

Although options (2-3) would seem much more secure than (1), they do have their problems. In regard to the save-point, the issue is that I don't know of anyone who actually returned to medicine from EA/AIS work. And the mere option of a high-paying doesn't necessarily make your life all that stable unless you actually do work as a doctor, which will take time. Whereas you could perhaps be making your life more stable by working straight away. So you can argue that (2) it's just wasting time. The issue with (3) is that it's hard to get into a PhD in a strong CS or stats department. The supervisor that you find may be of more of a mixed background, which may be less impressive to AI people. Then again you need to be realistic about where this all ends up: if you become a professor, this is mostly likely to happen at a medical school. If you become a researcher, the most common outcome would not be that you get to work at a frontier lab. Rather, the most lucrative roles that are achievable would more likely be in startups that apply AI to medicine. And, the most impactful and interesting roles that are available are often more research-adjacent, like being a research manager, a policy advisor, or something like that.

Overall thoughts

As you can see, this is not such a simple question to answer. Transitioning from medicine to AI is a complicated judgment. I'm very happy I did it, but for someone in your place, I can only recommend that you understand and weigh the different considerations, and try to arrive at a decision that is best for you.