Thanks for the post! I think it does a good job of describing key challenges in AI field-building and funding.
The talent gap section describes a lack of positions in industry organizations and independent research groups such as SERI MATS. However, there doesn’t seem to be much content on the state of academic AI safety research groups. So I’d like to emphasize the current and potential importance of academia for doing AI safety research and absorbing talent. The 80,000 Hours AI risk page says that there are several academic groups working on AI safety including the Algorithmic Alignment Group at MIT, CHAI in Berkeley, the NYU Alignment Research Group, and David Krueger’s group in Cambridge.
The AI field as a whole is already much larger than the AI safety field so I think analyzing the AI field is useful from a field-building perspective. For example, about 60,000 researchers attended AI conferences worldwide in 2022. There’s an excellent report on the state of AI research called Measuring Trends in Artificial Intelligence. The report says that most AI publications come from the ‘education’ sector which is probably mostly universities. 75% of AI publications come from the education sector and the rest are published by non-profits, industry, and governments. Surprisingly, the top 9 institutions by annual AI publication count are all Chinese universities and MIT is in 10th place. Though the US and industry are still far ahead in ‘significant’ or state-of-the-art ML systems such as PaLM and GPT-4.
What about the demographics of AI conference attendees? At NeurIPS 2021, the top institutions by publication count were Google, Stanford, MIT, CMU, UC Berkeley, and Microsoft which shows that both industry and academia play a large role in publishing papers at AI conferences.
Another way to get an idea of where people work in the AI field is to find out where AI PhD students go after graduating in the US. The number of AI PhD students going to industry jobs has increased over the past several years and 65% of PhD students now go into industry but 28% still go into academic jobs.
Only a few academic groups seem to be working on AI safety and many of the groups working on it are at highly selective universities but AI safety could become more popular in academia in the near future. And if the breakdown of contributions and demographics of AI safety will be like AI in general, then we should expect academia to play a major role in AI safety in the future. Long-term AI safety may actually be more academic than AI since universities are the largest contributor to basic research whereas industry is the largest contributor to applied research.
So in addition to founding an industry org or facilitating independent research, another path to field-building is to increase the representation of AI safety in academia by founding a new research group though this path may only be tractable for professors.
Thanks for the post! I think it does a good job of describing key challenges in AI field-building and funding.
The talent gap section describes a lack of positions in industry organizations and independent research groups such as SERI MATS. However, there doesn’t seem to be much content on the state of academic AI safety research groups. So I’d like to emphasize the current and potential importance of academia for doing AI safety research and absorbing talent. The 80,000 Hours AI risk page says that there are several academic groups working on AI safety including the Algorithmic Alignment Group at MIT, CHAI in Berkeley, the NYU Alignment Research Group, and David Krueger’s group in Cambridge.
The AI field as a whole is already much larger than the AI safety field so I think analyzing the AI field is useful from a field-building perspective. For example, about 60,000 researchers attended AI conferences worldwide in 2022. There’s an excellent report on the state of AI research called Measuring Trends in Artificial Intelligence. The report says that most AI publications come from the ‘education’ sector which is probably mostly universities. 75% of AI publications come from the education sector and the rest are published by non-profits, industry, and governments. Surprisingly, the top 9 institutions by annual AI publication count are all Chinese universities and MIT is in 10th place. Though the US and industry are still far ahead in ‘significant’ or state-of-the-art ML systems such as PaLM and GPT-4.
What about the demographics of AI conference attendees? At NeurIPS 2021, the top institutions by publication count were Google, Stanford, MIT, CMU, UC Berkeley, and Microsoft which shows that both industry and academia play a large role in publishing papers at AI conferences.
Another way to get an idea of where people work in the AI field is to find out where AI PhD students go after graduating in the US. The number of AI PhD students going to industry jobs has increased over the past several years and 65% of PhD students now go into industry but 28% still go into academic jobs.
Only a few academic groups seem to be working on AI safety and many of the groups working on it are at highly selective universities but AI safety could become more popular in academia in the near future. And if the breakdown of contributions and demographics of AI safety will be like AI in general, then we should expect academia to play a major role in AI safety in the future. Long-term AI safety may actually be more academic than AI since universities are the largest contributor to basic research whereas industry is the largest contributor to applied research.
So in addition to founding an industry org or facilitating independent research, another path to field-building is to increase the representation of AI safety in academia by founding a new research group though this path may only be tractable for professors.