I’ll just comment on my experience as an undergrad at Yale in case it’s useful.
At Yale, the CS department, particularly when it comes to state of the art ML, is not very strong. There are a few professors who do good work, but Yale is much stronger in social robotics and there is also some ML theory. There are a couple AI ethics people at Yale, and there soon will be a “digital ethics” person, but there aren’t any AI safety people.
That said, there is a lot of latent support for AI safety at Yale. One of the global affairs professors involved in the Schmidt Program for Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Technology, and National Power is quite interested in AI safety. He invited Brian Christian and Stuart Russell to speak and guest teach his classes, for example. The semi-famous philosopher L.A. Paul is interested in AI safety, and one of the theory ML professors had a debate about AI safety in one of his classes. One of the professors most involved in hiring new professors specifically wants to hire AI safety people (though I’m not sure he really knows what AI safety is).
I wouldn’t really recommend Yale to people who are interested in doing very standard ML research and want an army of highly competent ML researchers to help them. But for people whose work interacts with sociotechnical considerations like policy, or is more philosophical in nature, I think Yale would be a fantastic place to be, and in fact possibly one of the best places one could be.
This is great thanks. It seems like someone wanting a large team of existing people with technical talent is a reason to not work somewhere like Yale. But what are the chances that the presence of lots of money and smart people would make this possible in the future? Is Yale working on strengthening its cs department? One of my ideas behind this post is that being the first person doing certain work in a department that has potential might have some advantages compared to being the 5th in a department that has already realized it’s potential. An ai safety professor at Yale might get invited to a lot of things, have little competition for advisees, be more uniquely known within Yale, and provide advocacy for ai safety in a way that counterfactually would not happen otherwise at the university.
I think this is all true, but also since Yale CS is ranked poorly the graduate students are not very strong for the most part. You certainly have less competition for them if you are a professor, but my impression is few top graduate students want to go to Yale. In fact, my general impression is often the undergraduates are stronger researchers than the graduate students (and then they go on to PhDs at higher ranked places than Yale).
Yale is working on strengthening its CS department and it certainly has a lot of money to do that. But there are a lot of reasons that I am not that optimistic. There is essentially no tech scene in New Haven, New Haven is not that great in general, the Yale CS building is extremely dingy (I think this has an actual effect on people), and it’s really hard to affect the status quo. However, I’m more optimistic that Yale will successfully forge a niche of interdisciplinary research, which is really a strength of the university.
I’ll just comment on my experience as an undergrad at Yale in case it’s useful.
At Yale, the CS department, particularly when it comes to state of the art ML, is not very strong. There are a few professors who do good work, but Yale is much stronger in social robotics and there is also some ML theory. There are a couple AI ethics people at Yale, and there soon will be a “digital ethics” person, but there aren’t any AI safety people.
That said, there is a lot of latent support for AI safety at Yale. One of the global affairs professors involved in the Schmidt Program for Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Technology, and National Power is quite interested in AI safety. He invited Brian Christian and Stuart Russell to speak and guest teach his classes, for example. The semi-famous philosopher L.A. Paul is interested in AI safety, and one of the theory ML professors had a debate about AI safety in one of his classes. One of the professors most involved in hiring new professors specifically wants to hire AI safety people (though I’m not sure he really knows what AI safety is).
I wouldn’t really recommend Yale to people who are interested in doing very standard ML research and want an army of highly competent ML researchers to help them. But for people whose work interacts with sociotechnical considerations like policy, or is more philosophical in nature, I think Yale would be a fantastic place to be, and in fact possibly one of the best places one could be.
This is great thanks. It seems like someone wanting a large team of existing people with technical talent is a reason to not work somewhere like Yale. But what are the chances that the presence of lots of money and smart people would make this possible in the future? Is Yale working on strengthening its cs department? One of my ideas behind this post is that being the first person doing certain work in a department that has potential might have some advantages compared to being the 5th in a department that has already realized it’s potential. An ai safety professor at Yale might get invited to a lot of things, have little competition for advisees, be more uniquely known within Yale, and provide advocacy for ai safety in a way that counterfactually would not happen otherwise at the university.
I think this is all true, but also since Yale CS is ranked poorly the graduate students are not very strong for the most part. You certainly have less competition for them if you are a professor, but my impression is few top graduate students want to go to Yale. In fact, my general impression is often the undergraduates are stronger researchers than the graduate students (and then they go on to PhDs at higher ranked places than Yale).
Yale is working on strengthening its CS department and it certainly has a lot of money to do that. But there are a lot of reasons that I am not that optimistic. There is essentially no tech scene in New Haven, New Haven is not that great in general, the Yale CS building is extremely dingy (I think this has an actual effect on people), and it’s really hard to affect the status quo. However, I’m more optimistic that Yale will successfully forge a niche of interdisciplinary research, which is really a strength of the university.