Ryan Kidd

Don't rule things out as possible directions.

Just shift and reallocate resources to them.

To their credit, Coefficient Giving have done an amazing job, particularly recently, at supporting a bunch of different novel research bets.

And they've also funded PIBs, or Principles of Intelligence, a program that is trying very hard to pursue sort of moonshot-y interpretability in agency understanding projects.

So they're great.

Check them out.

I think that

more ideas to be good.

I think that the kind of person who should be pursuing that typically is going to look something like someone who is already a domain expert in some other area.

You are occasionally going to have your Buck Shledgers, your Evan Hubingers, right, come along with no PhD, but spent years at MIRI,

incubating in that deep AI safety, that rich AI safety experience, and then come out with amazing stuff like risk and alert optimization and AI control and all that stuff.

But short of having access to that type of community and that type of research experience, I think most of the prominent connectors, like your Alex Turners and so on, have spent a lot of time in research science PhDs.

Also on Lesterong, of course, and incubating in that environment as well.

So I think MATS is a great way for that kind of person to develop and to spawn more research ideas.

In fact, I've seen, to shout out Alex Turner, he has come up with some amazing research ideas over his time at MATS, and I think we've been very fortunate to support him.

Things like gradient routing, and also Alex Cloud, another mass mentor.

And just plenty of other things, like activation engineering and searing.

He was one of the people involved in that.

So I think that senior experienced researchers are gonna be probably, like most things, the main drivers of new ideas.

And grant funding that lets them pursue whatever their research taste dictates is great.