If you are reading this, you likely already believe that AI safety is among the most important problems of our time. AI systems pose great catastrophic and existential risks, and we will struggle to navigate those risks as they grow and become more prominent.

AI safety fieldbuilding at universities is an extremely impactful activity. As a highly competent AIS fieldbuilder, you can create multiple counterfactual AI safety careers with only a few semesters of focused effort, potentially multiplying your lifetime impact. This impact does not just end when you graduate but can extend for much longer after you cease to attend your university.

Additionally, AI safety fieldbuilding is a great way to build career capital for working in the AI safety space. It grows your soft skills (leadership, project, and team management, discussion skills), gets you thinking about AI safety much more, and helps you build relationships with key current and future stakeholders in the space.

There are very few AI safety university groups in existence (by our count, around 80), so the territory is pretty uncharted. It might be that the ones that are doing well have found robust strategies or that they just got lucky. For your group to actually decrease existential risks from AI, this will probably take a lot of good judgment calls, strategic thinking, a huge investment of effort, and steering as you grow and learn more information.