I guess it depends a lot on what the organization is doing and how exactly we classify “support staff.” For my part I’m reasonably enthusiastic about eventually hiring people who are engaged in research but whose main role is more like clarifying, communicating, engaging with outside world, prioritizing, etc., and I could imagine doing like 25-50% as much of that kind of work as we do of frontier-pushing? I don’t know whether you’d classify those people as researchers (though I probably wouldn’t call it “support” since that seems to kind of minimize the work).
Once you are relying on lots of computers, that’s a whole different category of work and I’m not sure what the right way of organizing that is or what we’d call support.
In terms of things like fundraising, accounting, supporting hiring processes, making payroll and benefits, budgeting, leasing and maintaining office space, dealing with the IRS, discharging legal obligations of employers, immigration, purchasing food, etc.… I’d guess it’s very similar to other research organizations with similar salaries. I’m very ignorant about all of this stuff (I expect to learn a lot about it) but I’d guess that depending on details it ends up being 10-20% of staff. But it could go way lower if you outsource a lot to external vendors rather than in-house. (And if you organize a lot of events then that kind of work could just grow basically without bound and in that case I’d again wonder if “support” is the right word.)
What’s the optimal ratio of researchers to support staff in an AI alignment research organization?
I guess it depends a lot on what the organization is doing and how exactly we classify “support staff.” For my part I’m reasonably enthusiastic about eventually hiring people who are engaged in research but whose main role is more like clarifying, communicating, engaging with outside world, prioritizing, etc., and I could imagine doing like 25-50% as much of that kind of work as we do of frontier-pushing? I don’t know whether you’d classify those people as researchers (though I probably wouldn’t call it “support” since that seems to kind of minimize the work).
Once you are relying on lots of computers, that’s a whole different category of work and I’m not sure what the right way of organizing that is or what we’d call support.
In terms of things like fundraising, accounting, supporting hiring processes, making payroll and benefits, budgeting, leasing and maintaining office space, dealing with the IRS, discharging legal obligations of employers, immigration, purchasing food, etc.… I’d guess it’s very similar to other research organizations with similar salaries. I’m very ignorant about all of this stuff (I expect to learn a lot about it) but I’d guess that depending on details it ends up being 10-20% of staff. But it could go way lower if you outsource a lot to external vendors rather than in-house. (And if you organize a lot of events then that kind of work could just grow basically without bound and in that case I’d again wonder if “support” is the right word.)