[gessha]

Not to be cynical about it BUT a few safety papers a year with proper support is totally within the capabilities of a single PhD student and it costs about 100-150k to fund them through a university. Not saying that’s what Anthropocene does, I’m just saying chump change for those companies.

[pixl97]

Sometimes I think people misunderstand how hard of problem AI safety actually is. It's politics and mathematics wrapped up in a black box of interactions we barely understand.

More so we train them on human behavior and humans have a lot of rather unstable behaviors.

[rrr_oh_man]

You are very off (unfortunately) about how little PhD students are being paid

[pja]

> You are very off (unfortunately) about how little PhD students are being paid

All in costs for a PhD student include university overheads & tuition fees. The total probably doesn't hit $150k but is 2-3x the stipend that the student is receiving.

Someone currently working in academia might have current figures to hand.

[latexr]

Worth mentioning that numbers for the US are unlikely to be representative when discussing it as a whole, though might be relevant to this specific case.

[pja]

In the UK the all in cost of a PhD student starts somewhere around £45k once you include overheads I believe. If you need expensive lab support then it probably goes up from there.

So about $75k for the bottom end? The quoted numbers sound about right in PPP terms in that case.

[gessha]

Figure cited is what the company gets charged, not what the student gets. I’m fairly familiar with what gets thrown at students :(