Since slots in AI safety programs like MATs and the Anthropic Fellows Program seem to be limited by available mentors and not money, they should add a consolation prize where anyone who meets the bar but isn't selected still gets the thousands of dollars of GPU rental or API credits if they promise to write something about what they did with it.
afaik it’s incorrect to model these programs as having a single ‘bar’. Mentors pick their scholars. MATS has done some pruning of applicants based on a mentor’s specifications in the past, to save mentor time, but (unless something has changed in the last 18 months) doesn’t enforce a universal standard (and doing so would be operationally costly, since different mentors are looking for different things - often dramatically different).
I don’t know how Anthropic fellows works in this regard, but they have less natural cause to take interest in this kind of thing (since they’re explicitly trying to be Anthropic’s hiring pipeline). Hiring is about ruling people out, not in.
18Yong
One potential concern is that we might risk producing slops - and in some way we have to review what they write and that might still place burden on the system.
I went through Astra and I think that I benefitted the most from the weekly meetings with my mentors. If I had just gotten research credits, I‘d most likely just publish work that doesn’t matter. Even if I got constructive feedback at the end, not sure if those time sunk is worth it.
Perhaps this (giving credits) might be best structured as microgrant like what Leo put out.
I wouldn't expect this to provide nearly as much benefit as mentors, but I think having the resources to run experiments would still be valuable for learning. I don't think the output is even that important besides the fact that people should run experiments with the goal of learning something.
I also didn't mean to imply that the mentors would actually read the results (that would require the scarce resource that we already don't have enough of).