Semi-related YouTube news: the latest 3Blue1Brown video on language models (from 3 days ago) shows and scrolls through a post on the AI alignment forum, at about 1 and 2 mins in. It’s at ~300k views atm.
Cold emailing Youtubers offering to chat about mechanistic interpretability turns out to be a way, way more effective strategy than I predicted! I’m super excited about that video (and it came out so well!). The video
Potentially. Keep in mind however, these guys get a LOT of email from fans asking them to talk about various things (One of the more funnier examples was a group I am in on FB for fans of english prog band Cardiacs decided to try and launch a campaign to get music youtuber Rick Beato to talk about the band. He was spammed so hard with fans that he apparently lost his temper at them. Needless to say, Mr Beato has not covered Cardiacs). Possibly a smarter approach would be to approach their management whos jobs are to handle this sort of stuff , you might get a better result. Also, don’t forget the social media channels. Twitter , uh X or whatever its called this week, does offer a conduit where directly approaching media figures is a little more normalized.
Agreed, chance of success when cold emailing busy people is low, and spamming them is bad. And there are alternate approaches that may work better, depending on the person and their setup—some Youtubers don’t have a manager or employees, some do. I also think being able to begin an email with “Hi, I run the DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team” was quite helpful here.
I actually tried this on an unrelated topic earlier, but didn’t get a response. (Which has been my general experience—little-to-no interest whenever I send people cold emails, apart from academics.)
Semi-related YouTube news: the latest 3Blue1Brown video on language models (from 3 days ago) shows and scrolls through a post on the AI alignment forum, at about 1 and 2 mins in. It’s at ~300k views atm.
Cold emailing Youtubers offering to chat about mechanistic interpretability turns out to be a way, way more effective strategy than I predicted! I’m super excited about that video (and it came out so well!). The video
Potentially. Keep in mind however, these guys get a LOT of email from fans asking them to talk about various things (One of the more funnier examples was a group I am in on FB for fans of english prog band Cardiacs decided to try and launch a campaign to get music youtuber Rick Beato to talk about the band. He was spammed so hard with fans that he apparently lost his temper at them. Needless to say, Mr Beato has not covered Cardiacs). Possibly a smarter approach would be to approach their management whos jobs are to handle this sort of stuff , you might get a better result. Also, don’t forget the social media channels. Twitter , uh X or whatever its called this week, does offer a conduit where directly approaching media figures is a little more normalized.
Agreed, chance of success when cold emailing busy people is low, and spamming them is bad. And there are alternate approaches that may work better, depending on the person and their setup—some Youtubers don’t have a manager or employees, some do. I also think being able to begin an email with “Hi, I run the DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team” was quite helpful here.
Neat; would he maybe be interested in discussing social choice on his channel? I’m on the Summer of Math Exposition Discord with the name @statslime
I believe the implied next step is for you to cold email a YouTuber you think is interested in that :-)
Yeah, if I made an introduction it would ruin the spirit of it!
I actually tried this on an unrelated topic earlier, but didn’t get a response. (Which has been my general experience—little-to-no interest whenever I send people cold emails, apart from academics.)