Stop telling people to pivot to AI safety, I beg you — LessWrong
Comment by Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel - Fwiw I run a fieldbuilding and research ai safety organization and I agree with this take. We hire aggressively, we don't do half a dozen performative hiring rounds. Our placement data indicates the majority in our programs end up in some kind of longer-term AI safety job. Nevertheless, I agree with the OP that there should be more honest messaging. It's good that there are so many entry opportunities but it would be helpful if there was more clear-eyed messaging about long-term job opportunities. My sense is that compared to eg academia the job market is much better in AI safety but nevertheless many aspiring AI safety researchers/generalists may struggle to find a job for a long time. I also strongly dislike the weird 2-faced messaging which is at the same time naively idealistic ('everyone should switch!') and elitist (ooooh it's so hard to find talent). In my not so humble opinion, there is a very self-congratulatory sense of elitism in AI safety insider circles: cf all the talk about 'high context'. The fact is that AI safety is not a galaxy-brained concept. One can get up to speed with the basics relatively quickly. It is simply not that deep compared to many other fields. That doesn't mean there can't be large differences between researchers - there definitely are - but that in many cases this kind of talk comes from often mildly mediocre people who were just early / know the right people / parrot the accepted ideology. In many cases it is more a question of who you know than what you know. eg as a random guestimate I would guestimate that being up to date with say mid 20th century electrical engineering is intellectually more challenging than being up to date with the sota of interpretability research.