I've been leaning towards a career in academia for >3 years, and recently got a tenure track role at Cambridge. This post sketches out my reasoning for preferring academia over industry.

Thoughts on Industry Positions:
A lot of people working on AI x-risk seem to think it's better to be in industry. I think the main arguments for that side of things are:

All the usual reasons for preferring industry, e.g. less non-research obligations, more resources.
AGI is expected to be built in industry (e.g. by OpenAI, Google, or DeepMind), and if you're there, you can influence the decision-making around development and deployment.

I think these are good reasons, but far from definitive.
I'll also note that nobody seems to be going to Google, even though they are arguably the most likely to develop AGI, since 1) they are bigger, publish more, and have more resources, 2) they can probably steal from DeepMind to some extent. So if you ARE going to industry, please consider working for Google. Also Chinese companies.

My reasons for preferring academia:

Mentorship and exponential growth: In academia, you can mentor a lot more people, and this leads to a much higher rate of exponential growth. My quick estimate is that as an academic you can produce ~10 new researchers in 5 years; in industry, it's more like ~3. I think you might also have significant, but hard-to-measure impact through teaching and other academic activities.
Personal fit: Unlike (I think) most people in the field, I don't like coding much. I'm also not a theoretician. I am more of a "big picture" "idea person", and more of an extrovert. I like the idea of spending most of my time managing others, writing, giving talks, etc. I have far too many ideas to pursue on my own effectively. I also don't like the idea of having a boss.
Better position for advocacy: There are many reasons I think academia makes for a better "bully pulpit".
- A tenure track faculty position at a top-20 institution is higher status than a research scientist position.
- Many academics find employees of big tech companies somewhat suspect, e.g. viewing them as sell-outs or shills to some extent.
- None of the tech companies has a sufficiently credible commitment to reducing AI x-risk (and knowing what steps to take to do that) for my taste.
- Te

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Mentorship [Topic of]