Thanks, Neel! I responded in greater detail to Ryan’s comment but just wanted to note here that I appreciate yours as well & agree with a lot of it.
My main response to this is something like “Given that MATS selects the mentors and selects the fellows, MATS has a lot of influence over what the fellows are interested in. My guess is that MATS’ current mentor pool & selection process overweights interpretability and underweights governance + technical governance, relative to what I think would be ideal.”
Thanks for this (very thorough) answer. I’m especially excited to see that you’ve reached out to 25 AI gov researchers & already have four governance mentors for summer 2024. (Minor: I think the post mentioned that you plan to have at least 2, but it seems like there are already 4 confirmed and you’re open to more; apologies if I misread something though.)
A few quick responses to other stuff:
I appreciate a lot of the other content presented. It feels to me like a lot of it is addressing the claim “it is net positive for MATS to upskill people who end up working at scaling labs”, whereas I think the claims I made were a bit different. (Specifically, I think I was going for more “Do you think this is the best thing for MATS to be focusing on, relative to governance/policy”and “Do you think there are some cultural things that ought to be examined to figure out why scaling labs are so much more attractive than options that at-least-to-me seem more impactful in expectation”).
RE AI control, I don’t think I’m necessarily underestimating its popularity as a metastrategy. I’m broadly aware that a large fraction of the Bay Area technical folks are excited about control. However, I think when characterizing the AI safety community as a whole (not just technical people), the shift toward governance/policy macrostrategies is (much) stronger than the shift toward the control macrostrategy. (Separately, I think I’m more excited about foundational work in AI control that looks more like the kind of thing that Buck/Ryan have written about is separate from typical prosaic work (e.g., interpretability), even though lots of typical prosaic work could be argued to be connected to the control macrostrategy.)
+1 that AI governance mentors might be harder to find for some of the reasons you listed.