Aryeh Englander

Replacing reduction in income due to moving from full- to part-time work in order to pursue an AI safety-related PhD.

We’re funding Aryeh to drop to half-time on his AI-related work at Johns Hopkins’s Applied Physics Laboratory in order to pursue an AI PhD at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

I think that this grant is quite marginal, and there are many reasons that it might end up being a bad idea—it means Aryeh will be doing less work at APL, work that might have otherwise been directly useful, and has him putting a lot of time and effort into getting a PhD from a school with little name recognition outside of APL, though Aryeh assured us that UMBC was positively looked on within APL. Aryeh also assured us that he plans on staying at APL for quite some time, which helps to mitigate the downside of this credential being not very useful elsewhere.

Overall, I like the idea of there being AI-safety-knowledgeable people like Aryeh at APL—if APL ends up being a major player in AI, which seems very possible given that it’s one of the largest scientific research labs affiliated with the US federal government, I’d like to have people there who are knowledgeable and interested in AI safety. And according to Aryeh, APL values PhDs very highly, as one might expect for a government-affiliated lab—in particular, if Aryeh wants to lead an AI safety project, he has to have a PhD. Thus, we ended up deciding that it was worth sponsoring Aryeh to get a PhD as an investment in his ability to support AI safety at APL.