Ryan Kidd

It's harder to administrate.

And so we do rely on some proxies that are perhaps less specific than ideal, but I think are no worse than anyone else in the industry is doing.

And of course, I think the way you stand out, obviously it's going to depend on the specific mentor, because Matt's is very heterogeneous in that respect, right?

The best thing to apply to Neil Nanda's stream is going to be vastly different than applying to Ethan Perez and the Anthropic Megastream.

But in general, you want to like really understand your basics about AI safety.

So do a blue dot course, right?

Because there may be some critical knowledge or a paper that if you haven't read, you don't understand.

If you don't understand what deceptive alignment is, that might be really bad for Ethan Perez or Buck Sledgehurst's kind of control research, and even applying, getting into those streams.

If you don't understand that for InterpStream,

Probably doesn't matter as much unless, of course, you're dealing with deception in your interp thing.

So make sure you understand your basics.

Make sure that if you're applying to a stream that is empirical heavy, that you can do code signal tests.

You can code, including without AI assistance, at least for the time being.

And it doesn't hurt to apply to other programs as well.

Maths is far from the only program out there now.

This is not like

early days, like there are so many great research programs out there.

Pivotal, ERA, PIBS, Laser Labs, SPAR, ARENA for technical, I think Astra is now running again.

Yeah, there's tons of great programs out there.

And that can really boost your CV.