Some other possibilities that may be worth considering and can further reduce impact, at least for an individual looking to work on AI safety themself:
Some work is net negative and increases the risk of doom or wastes the time and attention of people who could be doing more productive things.
Practical limits on the number of people working at a time, e.g. funding, management/​supervision capacity. This could mean some people could have much lower probability of making a difference, if them taking a position pushes someone else who would have out from the field, or into (possibly much) less useful work.
Also, the estimate of the current number of researchers probably underestimates the number of people (or person-hours) who will work on AI safety. You should probably expect further growth to the number of people working on AI safety, because the topic is getting mainstream coverage and support, Hinton and Bengio have become advocates, and it’s being pushed more in EA (funding, community building, career advice).
However, the FTX collapse is reason to believe there will be less funding going forward.
Some other possibilities that may be worth considering and can further reduce impact, at least for an individual looking to work on AI safety themself:
Some work is net negative and increases the risk of doom or wastes the time and attention of people who could be doing more productive things.
Practical limits on the number of people working at a time, e.g. funding, management/​supervision capacity. This could mean some people could have much lower probability of making a difference, if them taking a position pushes someone else who would have out from the field, or into (possibly much) less useful work.
Also, the estimate of the current number of researchers probably underestimates the number of people (or person-hours) who will work on AI safety. You should probably expect further growth to the number of people working on AI safety, because the topic is getting mainstream coverage and support, Hinton and Bengio have become advocates, and it’s being pushed more in EA (funding, community building, career advice).
However, the FTX collapse is reason to believe there will be less funding going forward.