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Neel Nanda on leading a Google DeepMind team at 26 – and advice if you want to work at an AI company (part 2) - 80,000 Hours

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I think one common mistake people make is they assume you need to finish a PhD. This is completely false. You should just view PhDs as an environment to learn and gain skills. And if a better opportunity comes along… You’re done. You’re done early. Leave. — Neel Nanda At 26, Neel Nanda leads an AI safety team at Google DeepMind, has published dozens of influential papers, and mentored 50 junior researchers — seven of whom now work at major AI companies. His secret? “It’s mostly luck,” he says, but “another part is what I think of as maximising my luck surface area.” This means creating as many opportunities as possible for surprisingly good things to happen: Nanda’s own path illustrates this perfectly. He started a challenge to write one blog post per day for a month to overcome perfectionist paralysis. Those posts helped seed the field of mechanistic interpretability and, incidentally, led to meeting his partner of four years. His YouTube channel features unedited three-hour videos of

Neel Nanda on leading a Google DeepMind team at 26 – and advice if you want to work at an AI company (part 2) | 80,000 Hours Search for: On this page: 1 Introduction 1.1 The episode in a nutshell 2 Highlights 3 Articles, books, and other media discussed in the show 4 Transcript 4.1 Cold open [00:00:00] 4.2 Who's Neel Nanda? [00:01:11] 4.3 Luck surface area and making the right opportunities [00:01:47] 4.4 Writing cold emails that aren't insta-deleted [00:03:54] 4.5 How Neel uses LLMs to get much more done [00:09:18] 4.6 "If your safety work doesn't advance capabilities, it's probably bad safet

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