EA - Potential employees have a unique lever to influence the behaviors of AI labs by oxalis

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Potential employees have a unique lever to influence the behaviors of AI labs, published by oxalis on March 18, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.(Cross posted from my personal blog)People who have received and are considering an offer from an AI lab are in a uniquely good spot to influence the actions of that lab.People who care about AI safety and alignment often have things they wish labs would do. These could be requests about prioritizing alignment and safety (eg. having a sufficiently staffed alignment team, having a public and credible safety and alignment plan), good governance (eg. having a mission, board structure, and entity structure that allows safety and alignment to be prioritized), information security, or similar. This post by Holden goes through some lab asks, but take this as illustrative, not exhaustive!So you probably have, or could generate, some practices or structures you wish labs would have in the realm of safety and alignment. Once you have received an offer to work for a lab, that lab suddenly cares about what you think far more than when you are someone who is just writing forum posts or tweeting at them.This post will go through some ways to potentially influence the lab in a positive direction after you have received your offer.Does this work? This is anecdata but I have seen offer holders win concessions, and I have heard recruiters talk about how these sorts of behaviors influence the lab’s strategy.We also have reason to expect this works given that hiring good ML and AI researchers is competitive, and that businesses have changed aspects about themselves in the past partially to help with recruitment. Some efforts for gender or ethnic diversity or environmental sustainability are taken so that hiring from groups who care about these things doesn’t become too difficult. One example is that Google changed its sexual harassment rules and did not renew its contract with the Pentagon over mass employee pushback. Of course some of this stuff they may have intrinsically cared about or done to appease the customers or the public at large, but it seems employees have a more direct lever and have successfully used it.The StrategyThere are steps you can take at different stages of your hiring process. The best time to do this is when you have received an offer, because then you know they are interested in you and so will care about your opinion.Follow up call(s) or email just after receiving offerIn the follow up call after your offer you can express any concerns before you join. This is a good time to make requests. I recommend being polite, grateful for the offer, and framing these as “Well, look I’m excited about the role but I just have some uncertainties or aspects that if they were addressed would make this is a really easy decision for me”Some example asks:I want the safety/alignment team to be largerI want to see more public comms about alignment strategyI would like to see coordination with other labs on safety standards and slower scaling, as well as independent auditing of safety and security effortsI want an empowered, independent boardTheory of change:They might actually grant requests! I have seen this happen. If they don’t, they will still hear that information and if enough people say it, they may grant it in the future. This also sets you up for the next alternative which is.When you turn down an offerIf you end up turning down the offer, either to work at another AI lab or some other entity, you should tell them why you did. If you partially turned them down because of concerns about their strategy or that they didn’t fulfill one of your asks, tell them!The most direct way to do this is to email your recruiter. Eg. write to the recruiter something like:“Thanks for this offer. I decided to turn it down...