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The salaries are too damn low• AI safety has a salary overhang. A bunch of people are paid way below their market rate. (Also true of EA, but I’ll lump them under “AI safety” for this piece).• This has been getting a bit better, very recently — I hear about eg Redwood Research technical talent making ~$800k/y in salary. But when you compare this to the $10-100m/y comp packages for talent in labs, it still seems kind of low. And CG’s money cannon has fired very few shots to date — maybe ~15 orgs hit, see Trace — so the raises are still very unequally distributed.• It’s not just rank-and-file employees, by the way. Even the leadership is grossly underpaid. The numbers I hear range from $150k - $600k/y, for execs at top orgs like METR, MATS, FAR.AI, Constellation. Like, c’mon, I made $250k/y total comp as a undistinguished new grad software engineer in 2016 Google. For the leaders of preeminent safety orgs, surely we can do better than that.• If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might say that “accepting lower salaries” is a psyop from funders.• Low salaries mean that employees and execs remain beholden to funders, rather than having the independence to work on what makes their heart sing. For me, hitting FIRE early in my tech career allowed me to quit my job and work on side projects and startups. To this day, I feel more independent from the “AI safety hivemind” because my paycheck doesn’t depend on it.• Paying low salaries is also penny-wise, pound-foolish from the perspective of funders & orgs. It means that great talent ends up choosing not to work in safety roles. A lot of the safety brain drain is because the labs are bidding much higher.• Also, funder <> org <> employee values are much more aligned within AI safety than in the wider world. Much of what these employees might buy with extra money are things that would be good by the lights of the funder & the org — eg donating to charities or other important causes. (Orgs could offer large donation matches in lieu