Fwiw I’m pretty confident that if a top professor wanted funding at 50k/year to do AI Safety stuff they would get immediately funded, and that the bottleneck is that people in this reference class aren’t applying to do this.
There’s also relevant mentorship/management bottlenecks in this, so funding them to do their own research is generally a lot less overall costly than if it also required oversight.
Fwiw I’m pretty confident that if a top professor wanted funding at 50k/year to do AI Safety stuff they would get immediately funded, and that the bottleneck is that people in this reference class aren’t applying to do this.
There’s also relevant mentorship/management bottlenecks in this, so funding them to do their own research is generally a lot less overall costly than if it also required oversight.
(written quickly, sorry if unclear)