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Thoughts on high-level theory of impact (somewhat overfit to myself)
It's useful to model labs as rushing towards AGI, with a limited safety budget. Within that, they'll allocate resources based on a combination of (i) importance and (ii) tractability.
Therefore valuable research will either (i) demonstrate something is important / not important, or (ii) show that something is more tractable than previously thought. Both of these will affect the resource allocations of labs.
For people outside labs, one path to impact is to do 'general science' / establish 'playbooks' that makes it easy for labs to implement effective interventions that improve outcomes.