We invest heavily in fellowships, but do we know exactly where people go and the impact the fellowships have? To begin answering this question I manually analyzed over 600 alumni profiles from 9 major late-stage fellowships (fellowships that I believe could lead directly into a job following). These profiles represent current participants and alumni from MATS, GovAI, ERA, Pivotal, Talos Network, Tarbell, Apart Labs, IAPS, and PIBBS.

Executive Summary

I’ve compiled a dataset of over 600 alumni profiles of 9 major 'late stage' AI Safety and Governance Fellowships.
I found over 10% of fellows did another fellowship after their fellowship. This doesn’t feel enormously efficient.
Almost ⅓ of ERA and Talos Network fellows (29.8% and 32.3% respectively) did another fellowship before or after, much higher than the average of 21.5%.
ERA particularly seemed to be a ‘feeder’ fellowship for other fellowships. Only 9.5% of ERA fellows had done a fellowship before ERA, but 20.2% did another fellowship following, almost double the 11.1% average.
GovAI Fellowship had strong direct links with other governance fellowships - i.e. many people went directly to or from other governance fellowships to GovAI. There were 13, 9 and 7 direct links between GovAI and ERA, IAPS and Talos Network respectively.
This is more directional than a conclusion, but according to preliminary results around 80% of alumni are still working in AI Safety.
I'm actively looking for collaborators/mentors to analyse counterfactual impact.

Key Insights from mini-project

Of the target fellowships I looked at, 21.5% (139) did at least one other fellowship alongside their target fellowship. 12.4% of fellows (80) had done a fellowship before the fellowship and 11.1% (72) did a fellowship after.

Since these fellowships are ‘late-stage’ - none of them are designed to be much more senior than many of the others - I think it is quite surprising that over 10% of alumni do another fellowship following the target fellowship.

I also think it’s quite surprising that only 12.4% of fellows had done an AI Safety fellowship before - only slightly higher than those who did one after. This suggests that fellowships are most of the time taking people from outside of the ‘standard fellowship stream’.

Individual fellowships

Whilst most fellowships tended to stick around the average, here are some n...

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