Building & Scaling the AI Safety Research Community, with Ryan Kidd of MATS

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Ryan Kidd, Co-Executive Director of MATS, the AI Safety Research Mentorship Program that with some 446 alumni working at nearly every AI safety organization you can name, is both the largest and by many accounts, the most impactful AI safety research talent pipeline in the world today. Regular listeners will know that MATS has recently come on as a sponsor to spread the word about their Summer 2026 program, which runs from June to August, and for which applications are now open with the deadline of January 18th. But this episode is not actually part of that sponsorship. On the contrary, I've supported MATS as a recommender for the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and as a small-time personal donor. And with a who's who roster of mentors that includes past guests Ryan Greenblatt of Redwood Research, Lee Sharkey of Goodfire, Nicholas Carlini, now at Anthropic, and Arthur Conmey, now at DeepMind, plus alumni, including past guests Marius Haban of Apollo Research, Jesse Hoogland of TMAIS, and now Ryan himself. Not to mention papers from Matts fellows popping up seemingly everywhere these days. A full episode deep dive into Matts is, as they say, self-recommending.
Ryan's incredible network, and Matts practice of tapping into their mentors' expertise to inform their decision-making, gives him an unusually well-sourced point of view on the current state of AI safety. And so, I couldn't resist beginning today with a discussion that touches on AGI timelines, the confusing mix of impressively ethical and flagrantly bad behavior that we see from frontier models today, and whether or not it's possible to cleanly separate AI safety and capabilities work. My main takeaway from this part of the conversation is that disagreement, even among the most well-informed and technically capable people, remains very high, which means that a high level of uncertainty about even the near-term future and a portfolio approach to research investments is really the only position that one can confidently defend. I found this discussion very well worthwhile for keeping my AI worldview up to date. But for those who just want Ryan's insights into the AI safety labor market, and advice for how to stand out in the MATS application process, you can feel free to skip ahead to the second half, in which Ryan first describes the research archetypes that MATS has identified, including the connectors who define new research agendas and often found organizations, the iterators who systematically develop those paradigms through experiments and analysis, and the amplifiers who help scale research teams. From there, we unpack why iterators have historically been in highest demand, and why that is starting to change as organizations grow and AI coding agents lower the engineering barrier to success in AI research. Plus, why it remains so hard to break into AI safety, despite the fact that many organizations are hiring, and how MATS hopes to help by identifying and developing top talent. Along the way, we also touch on which kinds of research require access to frontier models and which don't, and how much compute is generally needed for AI safety research today. How MATS assesses applicants, why some tangible research output is, for practical purposes, a requirement to make the cut, and how diverse their fellows are in terms of age and formal credentials. Finally, we cover the balance that we each believe the AI safety community should strike, between doubling down on existing research agendas and developing net new paradigms. If you're considering applying to MATS, and if you're excited about launching a new career in AI safety research, I think you should. Remember that the deadline for the Summer 2026 cohort is coming up on January 18th. And visit mattsprogram.org.tcr to learn more and get started. With that, I hope you enjoy this overview of the AI safety field and inside look at the talent pipeline shaping its future. With Ryan Kidd of MATS. Ryan Kidd, co-executive director at MATS, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Ryan Kidd** (3:55)
Thanks so much. I'm glad to be here.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:58)
I'm excited for this conversation. So I've mentioned a couple times that I've been a personal donor to MATS. I think it's actually the first time we've ever met and spoken, but your reputation certainly precedes you, and I've seen a lot of great work come out of the program and a lot of great reviews. And in my research also, as part of the Survival and Flourishing Fund Recommender Group, got a lot of great commentary on the importance of MATS as a talent pipeline into the AI safety research field. So big supporter of your work from afar, and I appreciate the fact that you guys have come on as a sponsor of the podcast recently as well. This conversation not technically a part of that deal, but we're in one of these open AI style circular flow of funds sorts of things where we're somehow both inflating one another's revenue.