Depends on what you mean by “resume building”, but I don’t think this is true for “need to do a bunch of AI safety work for free” or similar. i.e. for technical research, many people that have gone through MATS and then been hired at or founded their own safety orgs have no prior experience doing anything that looks like AI safety research, and some don’t even have much in the way of ML backgrounds. Many people switch directly out of industry careers into doing e.g. ops or software work that isn’t technical research. Policy might seem a bit trickier but I know several people who did not spend anything like years doing resume building before finding policy roles or starting their own policy orgs and getting funding. (Though I think policy might actually be the most “straightforward” to break into, since all you need to do to demonstrate compentence is publish a sufficiently good written artifact; admittedly this is mostly for starting your own thing. If you want to get hired at a “larger” policy org resume building might matter more.)
Depends on what you mean by “resume building”, but I don’t think this is true for “need to do a bunch of AI safety work for free” or similar. i.e. for technical research, many people that have gone through MATS and then been hired at or founded their own safety orgs have no prior experience doing anything that looks like AI safety research, and some don’t even have much in the way of ML backgrounds. Many people switch directly out of industry careers into doing e.g. ops or software work that isn’t technical research. Policy might seem a bit trickier but I know several people who did not spend anything like years doing resume building before finding policy roles or starting their own policy orgs and getting funding. (Though I think policy might actually be the most “straightforward” to break into, since all you need to do to demonstrate compentence is publish a sufficiently good written artifact; admittedly this is mostly for starting your own thing. If you want to get hired at a “larger” policy org resume building might matter more.)