“What holds AI safety together? Co-authorship networks from 200 papers” by Anna Thieser

About this episode

The episode discusses co-authorship networks in AI safety research and the dynamics between academia and industry.

We (social science PhD students) computed co-authorship networks based on a corpus of 200 AI safety papers covering 2015-2025, and we’d like your help checking if the underlying dataset is right. Co-authorship networks make visible the relative prominence of entities involved in AI safety research, and trace relationships between them. Although frontier labs produce lots of research, they remain surprisingly insular — universities dominate centrality in our graphs. The network is held together by a small group of multiply affiliated researchers, often switching between academia and industry mid-career. To us, AI safety looks less like a unified field and more like a trading zone where institutions from different sectors exchange knowledge, financial resources, compute and legitimacy without encroaching on each other's autonomy. Of course, these visualizations are only as good as the corpus underlying them, because the shape of the network is sensitive to what's included. Here's what it currently looks like showing co-authorship at the individual level: There are 2 details boxes here, which are omitted from this narration. The boxes have the titles "Figure 1: Methods" and "Figure…

People in this episode

Host: LessWrong

Guest: Anna Thieser

Topics covered

• AI safety
• co-authorship networks
• social science
• research collaboration
• academic publishing

Keywords

• AI safety
• co-authorship
• research networks
• academic collaboration
• social science

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: LessWrong

Books & works: AI safety papers

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