Money makes the world turn and it enables research, be it academic or independent. I would just focus on getting a bunch of that. Send out 10x to 20x more resumes than you already have, expand your horizons to the entire planet, and put serious effort into prepping for interviews.
You could also try getting a position at CHAI or some other org that supports AI alignment PhDs, but it’s my impression that those centres are currently funding constrained and already have a big list of very high quality applicants, so your presence or absence might not make that much of a difference.
Other than that, you could also just talk directly with the people working on alignment. Send them emails, and ask them about their opinion on what kind of experiments they’d like to know the result of but don’t have time to run. Then turn those experiments into papers. Once you’ve gotten a taste for it, you can go and do your own thing.
Money makes the world turn and it enables research, be it academic or independent. I would just focus on getting a bunch of that. Send out 10x to 20x more resumes than you already have, expand your horizons to the entire planet, and put serious effort into prepping for interviews.
You could also try getting a position at CHAI or some other org that supports AI alignment PhDs, but it’s my impression that those centres are currently funding constrained and already have a big list of very high quality applicants, so your presence or absence might not make that much of a difference.
Other than that, you could also just talk directly with the people working on alignment. Send them emails, and ask them about their opinion on what kind of experiments they’d like to know the result of but don’t have time to run. Then turn those experiments into papers. Once you’ve gotten a taste for it, you can go and do your own thing.