We're launching the Anthropic Fellows Program for AI Safety Research, a pilot initiative designed to accelerate AI safety research and foster research talent. The program will provide funding and mentorship for a small cohort of 10-15 Fellows to work full-time on AI safety research. Over the course of six months, Fellows will be matched with Anthropic mentors to investigate AI safety research questions in areas such as Adversarial Robustness, Dangerous Capability Evaluations, and Scalable Oversight.
From our previous external collaborations, we’ve seen that we can speed up progress towards our AI safety priorities by supporting technical talent—regardless of their level of previous experience—in their first forays into safety research. It’s also important for the development... (read 1019 more words →)
This was interesting and I would like to see more AI research organizations conducting + publishing similar surveys.
I agree that AI safety can be successfully pitched to a wider range of audiences even without mentioning superintelligence, though I'm not sure this will get people to "holy shit, x-risk." However, I do think that appealing to the more near-term concerns that people have could be sufficiently concerning to policymakers and other important stakeholders, and possibly speed up their willingness to implement useful policy.
Of course, this assumes that useful policy for near-term concerns will also be useful policy for AI x-risk. It seems plausible to me that the most effective policies for the latter look quite different from policies that clearly overlap with both, but still seems directionally good!