I am about to start working on a frontier lab safety team. This post presents a varied set of perspectives that I collected and thought through before accepting my offer. Thanks to the many people I spoke to about this.

For

You're close to the action. As AI continues to heat up, being closer to the action seems increasingly important. Being at a frontier lab allows you to better understand how frontier AI development actually happens and make better predictions about how it might play out in future. You can build a gears level model of what goes into the design and deployment of current and future frontier systems, and the bureaucratic and political processes behind this, which might inform the kinds of work you decide to do in future (and more broadly, your life choices).

Access to frontier models, compute, and infrastructure. Many kinds of prosaic [...]

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Outline:

(00:21) For

(06:59) Against

(20:36) Disclaimers

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.