Hi Pooja, thanks for sharing your experience. A 99% rejection rate sounds tough... Are you reaching out to cold connections looking for a job? If that's the case, I think it would be more fruitful to do some voluntary work and test your fit/make connections that way. 

I wish you the best in finding your fit!

Hi Cathy, I think you touch on the need for generalists not just to find roles within existing orgs but to actually found orgs, start projects, etc. independently. I believe this is a viable path, as there are grants willing to fund projects with a sound theory of change.

I also wonder if a lot of the talk of bottlenecks is anticipatory regarding the upcoming IPOs. Not sure!

Really happy to hear this - I would love to see opportunities that don't require relocating for months at a time.

Really good point that the field is selecting for those can withstand the uncertainty. I wonder if that's to some degree an appropriate selection i.e. in a field that relies on funding from a relatively small pool of donors.

I'm very keen to review what you're working on, whenever is helpful. It would be also be useful to get your thoughts on how much operations work can be projectised, and what are the barriers to contractors/freelancers being used by orgs. I'll message you so we can set up a call.

Interesting thoughts.

On your second point, I hadn't thought that the need for alignment was related to the risk of someone going to work on capabilities. I think it's more about understanding the landscape, the terminology, knowing how to communicate to people in the space, etc., i.e. things that might affect your ability to do good work. Maybe alignment wasn't the right term for this.

Thanks for your thoughts here, Mark. I have the same sense that short-term contracted work offer a win-win scenario for those transitioning and for orgs. I imagine starting by interviewing people in hiring positions within orgs and getting a sense for what is preventing them from using freelancers would be very useful. 

Hi, that sounds very helpful! I'd love to see your curriculum. I have also built myself a personal tracker for all of the various tasks involved in transitioning into AI safety - we could have a call to share notes as I think we've taken different approaches to the same problem and I'd like to see what's working for you.

Yes, I think you're right - it's not bad advice for many people.

Very enlightening. I'm most interested in the following excerpts:

1: Talent, not funding, is currently the binding constraint on the AI safety field.

2. I think field-building targeted at more experienced people who can go on to start and lead competent organisations (and who have networks to convert a load of other experienced people) is much more important than more junior field-building. I think most existing AI safety fellowships act as internship programmes for the labs, which is fine, but we should be doing more than that.

I'm wondering what specifically are the talents needed to start and lead competent organisations in this space? What gaps are there between existing orgs? And is that the only kind of talent that is constraining the AI safety field?