Yong Zheng-Xin

people seem to be interpreting this as “go and do MATS”. that’s not what I meant -- MATS is pretty good, but there’s lots of work to be done outside of AI safety fellowships!! here’s a quick brainstorm: - replicate important papers and results in AI safety - write up relevant findings from different papers on one topic, and try to reconcile any contradictions (or point out the contradictions, and suggest what work could resolve them) - read and summarise companies’ risk reports and AI safety research - pick particular claims in risk reports you think are important and write explanations of them, or stress-test them - write and maintain up-to-date summaries of areas of AI safety research (who’s working on them, what is the current state of our understanding, what’s the most important work and open questions) - write explainers of important technical questions or problems for busy non-technical audiences. e.g., what’s going on with CoT controllability and why does it matter; what do we know about reward seeking in frontier models; why might models sabotage AI safety research, and what signs of this have we seen; what’s going on with AI R&D uplift and why is this scary - become an expert in a research subfield and write up your takes on how good it is, how much resources/effort we should spend on it, what needs to be done next - pick literally any of the megapapers from the last 12mo, and one of the open questions it lists, and try to answer it - write explainers of recent AI safety incidents for the general public - write down a plan for making AI safety go well, notice how far reality is from that plan, and make it happen – e.g. tell an org you think is important about how they’re fucking up and how they can fix it, publicly write about what you want people to do - call or write to your representative and express your beliefs about AI safety - cold email people you think are doing good work, come up with some way you could help them, and pitch them on you doing that - stop overindexing on "do research"; go be a chief of staff or special projects or generalist at a great org. (if you can't get hired yet, talk to people, figure out an important project you can do in ~3mo, do it, then get hired) - go to a pause AI protest or volunteer for a local group (if you endorse them; I’m a fan of Pause AI UK and haven’t looked deeply into other groups) - lots of people are going to be very busy now; if you’re dispositionally a chin-scratching contemplative kind of person, now is a good time to do the big picture strategy/And What Else work they won’t have time to do i put this list together v quickly, i'm missing lots of important things. my main point is that there is _so_ much work to be done

now seems like a really really good time to stare into the void and figure out why you aren’t yet working on ai safety