My current guess is a lack of LTFF funding is probably producing more researchers at Anthropic than otherwise, because there just that aren’t many opportunities for people to work on safety or safety-adjacent roles. E.g. I know of people who are interviewing for Anthropic capability teams because idk man, they just want a safety-adjacent job with a minimal amount of security, and it’s what’s available. Having spoken to a bunch of people, I strongly suspect that of the people that I’d want to fund but won’t be funded, at least a good fraction are significantly less likely to join a scaling lab if they were funded, and not more.
I think this is true at the current margin, because we have so limited money.. But if we receive say enough funding to lower the bar to closer to what our early 2023 bar was, I will still want to make skill-up grants to fairly talented/promising people, and I still think they are quite cost-effective. I do expect those grants to have more capabilities externalities (at least in terms of likelihood, maybe in expectation as well) than when we give grants to people who currently could be hired at (eg) Anthropic but choose not to.
It’s possible you (and maybe Oli?) disagree and think we should fund moderate-to-good direct work projects over all (or almost all) skillup grants; in that case this is a substantive disagreement about what we should do in the future.
I think this is true at the current margin, because we have so limited money.. But if we receive say enough funding to lower the bar to closer to what our early 2023 bar was, I will still want to make skill-up grants to fairly talented/promising people, and I still think they are quite cost-effective. I do expect those grants to have more capabilities externalities (at least in terms of likelihood, maybe in expectation as well) than when we give grants to people who currently could be hired at (eg) Anthropic but choose not to.
It’s possible you (and maybe Oli?) disagree and think we should fund moderate-to-good direct work projects over all (or almost all) skillup grants; in that case this is a substantive disagreement about what we should do in the future.