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80% of MATS alumni who completed the program before 2025 are still working on AI safety today, based on a survey of all available alumni LinkedIns or personal websites (242/292 ~ 83%). 10% are working on AI capabilities, but only ~6 at a frontier AI company (2 at Anthropic, 2 at Google DeepMind, 1 at Mistral AI, 1 extrapolated). 2% are still studying, but not in a research degree focused on AI safety. The last 8% are doing miscellaneous things, including non-AI safety/capabilities software engineering, teaching, data science, consulting, and quantitative trading.
Of the 193+ MATS alumni working on AI safety (extrapolated: 234):
- 34% are working at a non-profit org (Apollo, Redwood, MATS, EleutherAI, FAR.AI, MIRI, ARC, Timaeus, LawZero, RAND, METR, etc.);
- 27% are working at a for-profit org (Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Goodfire, Meta, etc.);
- 18% are working as independent researchers, probably with grant funding from Open Philanthropy, LTFF, etc.;
- 15% are working as academic researchers, including PhDs/Postdocs at Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, ETH Zurich, UC Berkeley, etc.;
- 6% are working in government agencies, including in the US, UK, EU, and Singapore.
10% of MATS alumni co-founded an active AI safety start-up or team during or after the program, including Apollo Research, Timaeus, Simplex, ARENA, etc.
Errata: I mistakenly included UK AISI in the "non-profit AI safety organization" category instead of "government agency". I also mistakenly said that the ~6 alumni working on AI capabilities at frontier AI companies were all working on pre-training.
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I'd like to see a breakdown by "years since doing MATS". What's the retention like, basically? Another breakdown I'd like to see, either for the displayed data or the years-since-MATS one - what's the split in AI safety between "(co)founded an org", "joined a new org", "joined an established org/(research/policy) group (technical vs governance)", and "on a grant, no real org", along with the existing "academic" (split by core academic/alt-academia?), "government" (which country?), and for-profit (maybe a breakdown of product type?). In any case, thanks for posting this!
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What are some representative examples of the rest? I'm wondering if it's:
* AI wrappers like Cursor
* Model training for entirely mundane stuff like image gen at Stablediffusion
* Narrow AI like AlphaFold at Isomorphic
* An AGI-ish project but not LLMs, e.g. a company that just made AlphaGo type stuff
* General-purpose LLMs but not at a frontier lab (I would honestly count Mistral here)