EA - Available talent after major layoffs at tech giants by nicolenohemi

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: Available talent after major layoffs at tech giants, published by nicolenohemi on January 21, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Disclaimer: I am uncertain whether all of the relevant AI safety-related organizations this post might reach are net positive.Initially, I expected recruiting teams to already know about the layoffs discussed here, which is why I didn’t post about it sooner. When I asked some organizations about it, however, they were too swamped with other recruiting-related tasks, so none of them had heard about the layoffs (I didn’t yet get in touch with 80,000 hours). They were grateful for being connected with the available talent.SituationAmidst the volatile global economy, rising inflation, investor pressure, and increased borrowing costs, the highest number of job cuts in 2022 were ascribed to the tech sector, with almost 100,000 for the year, up by 649% compared to 2021 (Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.). Layoffs include engineers, ML researchers, executives, and more.List of layoffsLayoffs in numbers and (% of total employees)Meta: 11,000 (13%), among them, the Probability teamGoogle: 12,000 (6%)Amazon: 18,000 (1.2%)Twitter 3,750 (50%)Stripe Inc. 980 (14%)Salesforce: 8,000 (10%)etc.Notable example: Meta’s Probability teamSome of the Meta AI Probability team’s focus areas are differentiable and probabilistic programming and uncertainty, including increasing machine learning systems' robustness, trustworthiness, and efficiency by ascribing uncertainty measurements to models. Their whole team of about 50 employees was laid off. I had some casual chats with some of their team members, finding out that they were:already thinking about AI alignment,thought that “alignment definitely is important”,keen to start working in an AI alignment-related field, andhappy to apply/be contacted by AI safety-related orgs and even requested to connect with their recruiting teams.TakeawayThere is some seriously great tech talent that, sadly, has been laid off abruptly by the above-named tech giants. Thousands of individuals are now seeking new job opportunities. It could be beneficial for relevant organizations to explore this opportunity and consider contacting and encouraging some of them to apply for open positions.News sourcesNPRBloombergCNBC, CNBCThanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.