I think you’re right in that getting additional feedback (bouncing stuff of) is good.
Unfortunately, my rough sense right now is that things are geographically constrained (e.g. there’s stuff happening at CHAI in Berkeley, FHI in Oxford, and DeepMind in London, but not a lot of concentrated work elsewhere.) If you’re in the bible belt, my guess is Roman Yampolskiy is probably the closest (maybe?) person who’s doing lots of stuff in the field.
Speaking from my experience with CFAR (and not in any official capacity whatsoever), I think the AI Fellows tends to be held once a year in the summer/fall (although this might change w/ add’l funding), so that’s maybe also a ways off.
I’d encourage you, though, to reach out to people sooner than later, as you mention. It’s been my experience that people are helpful when you reach out, if you’re genuine about this stuff.
I haven’t reached out to anyone yet, primarily because I imagined that they (Luke, Eliezer, etc) receive many of these kinds of “I’m super excited to help, what can I do?” emails and pattern-matched that onto “annoying person who didn’t read the syllabus”. What has your experience been?
(This is part of what I was going for with the “find a person at a company who’s NOT the highest profile person to get feedback from.”)
Also, one person said to me “I’m generally quite happy to answer succinct, clear questions like ‘I’m considering whether to do X. I’ve thought of considerations N, M, and O. I’m wondering if consideration W is relevant?’”
As opposed to “Hey, what do you think of OpenAI/DeepMind/MIRI?” or other vague (and ‘can’t quite tell if this is an undercover journalist’)” style questions.
I think you’re right in that getting additional feedback (bouncing stuff of) is good.
Unfortunately, my rough sense right now is that things are geographically constrained (e.g. there’s stuff happening at CHAI in Berkeley, FHI in Oxford, and DeepMind in London, but not a lot of concentrated work elsewhere.) If you’re in the bible belt, my guess is Roman Yampolskiy is probably the closest (maybe?) person who’s doing lots of stuff in the field.
Speaking from my experience with CFAR (and not in any official capacity whatsoever), I think the AI Fellows tends to be held once a year in the summer/fall (although this might change w/ add’l funding), so that’s maybe also a ways off.
I’d encourage you, though, to reach out to people sooner than later, as you mention. It’s been my experience that people are helpful when you reach out, if you’re genuine about this stuff.
I haven’t reached out to anyone yet, primarily because I imagined that they (Luke, Eliezer, etc) receive many of these kinds of “I’m super excited to help, what can I do?” emails and pattern-matched that onto “annoying person who didn’t read the syllabus”. What has your experience been?
(I live in Oregon)
(This is part of what I was going for with the “find a person at a company who’s NOT the highest profile person to get feedback from.”)
Also, one person said to me “I’m generally quite happy to answer succinct, clear questions like ‘I’m considering whether to do X. I’ve thought of considerations N, M, and O. I’m wondering if consideration W is relevant?’”
As opposed to “Hey, what do you think of OpenAI/DeepMind/MIRI?” or other vague (and ‘can’t quite tell if this is an undercover journalist’)” style questions.