Mateo Fowler
You're an engineer who always wanted to do a startup. You're searching for exciting problems to solve. I want to propose to you an alternative path to doing the next Facebook: AI safety. This is the most important problem of our lifetime, and it's a great one to pick if you're young and ambitious. Last century brought us the airplane, the internet, computers, the moon landing and the most innovation we've ever experienced, yet the most important man was Robert Oppenheimer. We're back in an age of research, and the next split of the atom is superintelligence. The race to it has a lot of people working on making it happen, and very few working on making it safe. There are around 600 full-time safety researchers worldwide[1] 1. Stephen McAleese, field census, Sep 2025 · ~600 technical FTEs across 70 orgs , against something like 15,000 to 18,000 people at the five american labs[2] 2. Fortune, OpenAI headcount, Mar 2026 · Epoch . Safety is more important than 3 percent of the workforce. Th