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Here's some advice I often find myself giving folks getting into the AI governance space:
Take trends seriously. A lot of the impact GovAI and myself have had often relies on making some pretty basic inferences from important trends. E.g. the insight behind the frontier AI regulation work was simple: AI systems seem to keep improving. If they do, they’ll pose national security risks. If that happens, that may well warrant some government intervention. In short, run to where the ball is going. Make up your own mind. One mistake I sometimes see people making is focusing too much on not being wrong. To not get epistemic egg on their face. That can result in you not take risks, not trying to actually figure things out. That can stunt your own development. But it can also stunt the development on the field. Your job as a researcher is to contribute to our collective understanding of these really tricky issues, not just your own. Get a handle on the technical side of things. Read Epoch’s work. Read the model cards from the latest models. Think about what inference scaling might mean. Sometimes people who come from non-technical backgrounds feel like they can’t or won’t understand these things. If you feel that way, I get it, but I’d suggest you just give it a go. The bar you need to meet is not being able to train an AI model, it’s understanding how they work, how they’re developed, and being able to understand the policy implications of that. Ground yourself. Make sure that you have concrete decisions in mind when designing your research. Talk to decision-makers. Oftentimes, their constraints are not what you’d expect them to be. Further, lots of policy is more about nitty-gritty detail than about the high-level considerations. Swim in the waters. The best way to learn about something is to really immerse yourself in it, get obsessed by it. If you’re excited about the stuff you’re working on, lean into that. If you want to do with your Saturday afternoon is reading new papers, go for it. Back yourself. This is a young field. It is entirely possible to become a world-leading expert on an important topic in AI governance 1 to 2 years from now. That sounds kind of crazy – especially to someone like me who grew up in Sweden where tall poppy syndrome is rife (or “jantelagen” in Swedish) – but I think it’s true. Come pick some fruit. People often talk about looking for low-hanging fruit. My experience recently in the AI governance space is just low hanging fruit smacking me in the face. Of slipping on apples just strewn on the ground, rotting. We need some help here. We need some fruit pickers. We need some pie bakers. Come help out! Comments are closed.
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