Spend Money to Buy Opportunity

Day 7 of Inkhaven: 30 Days of Posts

It's difficult to comprehend just how rich the world of opportunity is in first world countries, coming from South Africa. I don't mean this in a vague way. I regularly encounter opportunities to join really exciting companies or businesses or to be part of things which are hugely out of the norm relative to what I could do at home. The people I know from home are capable enough to be highly competitive for many of these opportunities, but will simply never be exposed to them.

The moment when this clicked for me was when I attended EAGx Singapore in 2023 and someone told me that I could get a grant for 5000 USD to work on AI safety research. This absolutely blew my mind. I couldn't even sleep that night. Someone else told me they got a grant to go and stay in the Bay Area for 2 months just to get exposure to the AI scene there. I had no idea this world of funding, programs, and jobs existed and were eager to find capable people.

I planned how to make it work for a few months and then quit my job as a machine learning consultant at Spatialedge to do a master's at the University of Cape Town. To make this financially viable, I applied to Open Philanthropy's AI safety university group organiser fund, and started fieldbuilding efforts at UCT. Soon after that I met Leo Hyams, and a few months later we founded AI Safety South Africa, which has since grown significantly and is working to give others the opportunity to enter the field.

From there, things kept compounding. I got into MATS, a research program that took me to London and later the Bay Area, working with researchers at the frontier of AI safety. I'm now starting a PhD at Imperial College London. The most critical parts of making this work were becoming deeply enmeshed in these ideas, and having a community of people interested in this stuff to become truly obsessed with it. Since that community didn't exist when I started I created it, and it turns out this is a lot more straightforward than one might think.

This is what frustrates me. The bottleneck for most people I know back home isn't talent or work ethic. It's visibility. They're optimising within a set of options they can see, and that set is tiny compared to what's actually available. The stable job, the local promotion, the familiar industry. None of these are bad options, but they crowd out things you can't see yet.

I regularly think that if I had the options before me again, I should have chosen to be even less risk averse. I was helped by the fact that some funding made the transition easier, but it was really for peace of mind to ensure that I had some kind of savings. In retrospect this feels somewhat wasteful. I spent 4 months at my old job before quitting, months that could have been spent accelerating my progress. Naval Ravikant talks about valuing his time at $5000 per hour when he was starting out, which sounds insane, but the logic is simple: if you can pay someone less than that to save you an hour, it's a great trade. Those 4 months weren't free just because I was getting paid. They cost me time I could have spent learning, building, and positioning myself for what came next.

I often ask people when discussing career options: "how much runway do you have?" Because I genuinely think the best use of that money is buying yourself time to learn. Spend it on getting yourself into the room, and believe in what you can do to elevate yourself in 6 months. Ideally, also find a decent mentor to save you months of time.