I got into AI at the worst time possible

2023 marks the year AI Safety went mainstream. And though I am happy it is finally getting more attention, and finally has highly talented people who want to work in it; personally, it could not have been worse for my professional life. This isn’t a thing I normally talk about, because it’s a very weird thing to complain about. I rarely permit myself to even complain about it internally. But I can’t stop the nagging sensation that if I had just pivoted to alignment research one year sooner than I did, everything would have been radically easier for me.

I hate saturated industries. I hate hyped-up industries. I hate fields that constantly make the news and gain mainstream attention. This was one of the major reasons why I had to leave the crypto scene, because it had become so saturated with attention, grift, and hype, that I found it completely unbearable. Alignment and AGI was one of those things almost no one even knew about, and fewer even talked about, which made it ideal for me. I was happy with the idea of doing work that might never be appreciated or understood by the rest of the world.

Since 2015, I had planned to get involved, but at the time I had no technical experience or background. So I went to college, majoring in Computer Science. Working on AI and what would later be called “Alignment” was always the plan, though. I remember having a shelf in my college dorm, which I used to represent all my life goals and priorities: AI occupied the absolute top. My mentality, however, was that I needed to establish myself enough, and earn enough money, before I could transition to it. I thought I had all the time in the world.

Eventually, I got frustrated with myself for dragging my feet for so long. So in Fall 2022, I quit my job in cybersecurity, accepted a grant from the Long Term Future Fund, and prepared for spending a year of skilling-up to do alignment research. I felt fulfilled. When my brain normally nagged me about not doing enough, or how I should be working on something more important, I finally felt content. I was finally doing it. I was finally working on the Extremely Neglected, Yet Conveniently Super Important Thing™.

And then ChatGPT came out two months later, and even my mother was talking about AI.

If I believed in fate, I would say it seems as though I was meant to enter AI and Alignment during the early days. I enjoy fields where almost nothing has been figured out. I hate prestige. I embrace the weird, and hate any field that starts worrying about its reputation. I’m not a careerist. I can imagine many alternative worlds where I got in early, maybe ~2012 (I’ve been around the typical lesswrong/rationalist/transhumanist group for my entire adult life). I’d get in, start to figure out the early stuff, identify some of the early assumptions and problems, and then get out once 2022/2023 came around. It’s the weirdest sensation to feel like I’m too old to join the field now, and also feel as though I’ve been part of the field for 10+ years. I’m pretty sure I’m just 1-2 Degrees from literally everyone in the field.

The shock of the field/community going from something almost no one was talking about to something even the friggin’ Pope is weighing in on is something I think I’m still trying to adjust to. Some part of me keeps hoping the bubble will burst, AI will “hit a wall”, marking the second time in history Gary Marcus was right about something, and I’ll feel as though the field will have enough space to operate in again. As it stands now, I don’t really know what place it has for me. It is no longer the Extremely Neglected, Yet Conveniently Super Important Thing™, but instead just the Super Important Thing. When I was briefly running an AI startup (don’t ask), I was getting 300+ applicants for each role we were hiring in. We never once advertised the roles, but they somehow found them anyway, and applied in swarms. Whenever I get a rejection email from an AI Safety org, I’m usually told they receive somewhere in the range of 400-700 applications for every given job. That’s, at best, a 0.25% chance of acceptance: substantially lower than Harvard. It becomes difficult for me to answer why I’m still trying to get into such an incredibly competitive field, when literally doing anything else would be easier. “It’s super important” is not exactly making sense as a defense at this point, since there are obviously other talented people who would get the job if I didn’t.

I think it’s that I could start to see the shape of what I could have had, and what I could have been. It’s vanity. Part of me really loved the idea of working on the Extremely Neglected, Yet Conveniently Super Important Thing™. And now I have a hard time going back to working on literally anything else, because anything else could never hope to be remotely as important. And at the same time, despite the huge amount of new interest in alignment, and huge number of new talent interested in contributing to it, somehow the field still feels undersaturated. In a market-driven field, we would see more jobs and roles growing as the overall interest in working in the field did, since interest normally correlates with growth in consumers/investors/etc. Except we’re not seeing that. Despite everything, by most measurements, there seems to still be fewer than 1000 people working on it fulltime, maybe as low as ~300, depending on what you count.

So I oscillate between thinking I should just move on to other things; and thinking I absolutely should be working on this at all cost. It’s made worse by sometimes briefly doing temp work for an underfunded org, sometimes getting to the final interview stage for big labs, and overall thinking that doing the Super Important Thing™ is just around the corner… and for all I know, it might be. It’s really hard for me to tell if this is a situation where it’s smart for me to be persistent in, or if being persistent is dragging me ever-closer to permanent unemployment, endless poverty/homelessness/whatever-my-brain-is-feeling-paranoid-about… which isn’t made easier by the fact that, if the AI train does keep going, my previous jobs in software engineering and cybersecurity will probably not be coming back.

Not totally sure what I’m trying to get out of writing this. Maybe someone has advice about what I should be doing next. Or maybe, after a year of my brain nagging me each day about how I should have gotten involved in the field sooner, I just wanted to admit that: despite wanting the world to be saved, despite wanting more people to be working on the Extremely Neglected, Yet Conveniently Super Important Thing™, some selfish, not-too-bright, vain part of me is thinking “Oh, great. More competition.”