Gaurav Sett

AI Policy. PhD Student, @RANDCorporation. Non-Resident Fellow, @IFP.

[Gaurav Sett @GauravSett]

Made another task tracker for NPSM-11 on "Artificial Intelligence in the National Security Enterprise"

[Gaurav Sett @GauravSett]

Task tracker for the new EO on "Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security"

[Gaurav Sett @GauravSett]

@JanikaSchmitt Lead us to biosecurity victory

[Gaurav Sett @GauravSett]

@AlecStapp @IFP @JoinFAI Screen it like you mean it

[Gaurav Sett @GauravSett]

https://t.co/zkcl5q5wU9

[Gaurav Sett @GauravSett]

Task tracker for the new EO on "Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security"

[Tim Fist @fiiiiiist]

I’m hiring a Member of Technical Staff at IFP.

Your job will be to build software that allows us to operate with the effective capacity of a think tank 10 times our size.

If you care about reforming US policy, I think this is one of the highest leverage roles available: you’ll be directly amplifying the work of our extremely cracked and growing team of 35.

Given how important this job is, we will pay a $5,000 reward for any referral that results in a hire.

More on the role:

I expect this will be a hard role to fill, for a few reasons:

1. You have to believe US policy is the most important lever for impact

There are plenty of opportunities in the private sector for engineers to have a significant impact. But technical talent in public policy is far more neglected, and often much higher leverage.

IFP’s mission is to reform US policy to drive breakthrough discoveries, attract top talent, and expand our nation’s capacity to build.

We measure our efficacy by our counterfactual policy impact: whether we create good policy outcomes that would not have otherwise happened.

The software you build will directly affect the rate at which we can do this.

The work you help us do faster and better will be read in the Oval Office, will shape the direction of billions in federal $, and will directly influence geopolitical strategy. We need someone in this role who internalizes how important this is.

2. You have to want to deeply understand what effective policy work looks like

Many tasks in policy research and advocacy are time-consuming but basic text-to-text translation tasks, like simplifying results from academic papers, summarizing public comments on new regulations, and recording information about contacts from meeting notes.

This work is necessary to produce good policy outcomes, but laborious.

One way to understand this role is by looking at the way progress in AI capabilities has shifted the job of a programmer away from writing code and more towards specifying requirements and verifying the work of AI agents. In this role, you’ll do the same for policy work, moving the focus of our team away from basic natural language manipulation tasks and towards strategy, deep research, and policy engagement.

A crucial part of this work is identifying which parts of policy research and advocacy can be effectively automated with frontier models without compromising quality, and continually retooling to adapt to the latest state of the art.

The ideal candidate is someone who cares about building tools that people love to use and who can work effectively with our policy teams to understand their goals, processes, and constraints.

3. You have to be able to build a wide variety of great software

Your projects will vary widely, from building agent scaffolds to custom CRM tooling to deployment pipelines for maintainable, performant microsites (check out the full job description for more).

The right person will have led the design and delivery of complex user-facing products across the full stack, know how to ship quickly while building maintainable tech, and understand the trade-offs inherent in your design choices.

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This role is open to both remote work and people able to work out of our office in Washington, DC, with the latter being preferred.

The salary range for this role is $165,000 to $245,000. Here’s the full JD and link to apply: https://t.co/bsWWQwekru

Applications close May 31st.

[Gaurav Sett @GauravSett]

@GeorgiaCAdamson @abigaillafrica This rivalry is sure getting heated

[Jonah Weinbaum @WeinbaumJonah]

It’s time to build for AI resilience.

Billions are flowing into AI resilience. Whether it gets spent well or bottlenecked by lack of proposals depends on people with real ideas stepping up to scope and build them.

That's what The Launch Sequence is trying to make easier: we help authors turn vague ideas into concrete projects and connect them with funders ready to back serious work.

Our RFP is still open: https://t.co/GgwL6LoudW

[Tao Burga @taoburr]

Super excited about the OAI Foundation and Wojciech's announcement!

>$1B will flow over the next year, with $25B committed to curing diseases and AI resilience.

These are exactly the kinds of investments we’re hoping to generate concrete ideas for with The Launch Sequence’s RFP (https://t.co/tcotJYYH2e).

We’re collaborating with over 20 organizations to find and vet promising ideas, develop concrete proposals, find promising teams, and seek funding for them.

We’re also super excited about our advisory panel:
– @woj_zaremba , OpenAI co-founder leading the OpenAI Foundation’s AI Resilience portfolio
– @tkalil2050 CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy, and previous OSTP deputy director for tech and innovation.
– Kathleen Fisher CEO of ARIA and former DARPA I2O Director.
– @matthewclifford , Co-founder and Chair, Entrepreneurs First, Chair of ARIA, and previous UK prime minister's AI advisor.
– @geochurch , Director of Church Lab and co-founder of dozens of biotech startups.

Our RFP is still open.

If you have truly ambitious ideas for how philanthropies like the OAI Foundation can help prepare the world for advanced AI, send us your pitch: https://t.co/tcotJYYH2e

[Gaurav Sett @GauravSett]

Policy researchers—it is time to start transforming your work into verifiable tasks and delegating to agents.

[Tao Burga @taoburr]

The linear scale looks insane

[Gaurav Sett @GauravSett]

The future belongs to those who, in a long sequence of small decisions, dare to reach for better branches. Let them be the many.

[Tao Burga @taoburr]

How much control do we have over technological development?

Usually, not much. I think the evidence suggests we live in a strongly technologically deterministic world.

But sometimes, we can make small changes to tech development that have massive, lasting consequences:

Nuclear proliferation, COVID vaccines, permissive action links — what do these successful examples have in common?

Accelerating the development of critical technologies can alter the relative sequence in which they arrive. Small changes at the right time can make all the difference.

I think we’re in this critical window of opportunity for AI right now. Where, how, and in what order technologies are developed will likely decide whether we reach a good or a bad future.

There is no fundamental reason why everything should go well; no law of the universe conspiring to make things better.

We can acknowledge the strong constraints of tech determinism and still assume responsibility, take charge, and design a future that lives up to our optimism.

My first Substack post, in MACROSCIENCE
→ https://t.co/bYFDG8mTuy

[Gaurav Sett @GauravSett]

@taoburr Guide us to glory, Launch Director Burga.

[Caleb Watney @calebwatney]

If you have ideas in this vein, you should submit to The Launch Sequence!

$10k for published proposals, $1k for new ideas we greenlight

And we're working with funders to make sure there's follow-on capital if you want to build what you've written up 🏗️
https://t.co/Z0hjtIuoB8

[Wojciech Zaremba @woj_zaremba]

Looking for ambitious, concrete projects to prepare the world for advanced AI. 🧠 🚀

[Gaurav Sett @GauravSett]

@BenSchifman This will ruin Merced's reputation as the middle of nowhere.

[Séb Krier @sebkrier]

IFP is a rare combination: technically literate, genuinely bipartisan, and actually competent. If you're tired of policy slop and want to work on things that matter, you should pitch. Ideas matter!

[Jonah Weinbaum @WeinbaumJonah]

It's fashionable these days to say you're neither a doomer who cares only about the risks, nor an accelerationist who skips over them, but some secret middle category of reasonable people who want to maximize the benefits of AI and minimize the risks.

But how do we actually do that? What does society concretely need to build to make sure defensive capabilities don't get dangerously outpaced?

Concerningly, it is not clear.

For all the noise around AI progress, it's hard to put together a list of the defensive technologies we need to build, and even harder to find people actually executing on these ideas. There are billions soon to be pointed at this question and it's not clear what to do.

Do you have an idea for a technology, tool, or institution that needs to exist for us to positively navigate the transition to a world advanced AI? We want to know.

[Gaurav Sett @GauravSett]

@taoburr Godspeed, Launch Director Burga

[Gaurav Sett @GauravSett]

@matthewesche A golden age of science is ahead