No One Tells You When to Start
On contributing your way into AI safety and governance, before anyone is watching
Christen Rao started the AI Governance Club and asked for volunteers. Mariana Hungria was in the room on the first day, messaged the organiser afterwards offering to help with anything useful, and has co-organised it ever since. The third session had twenty-two people in it; almost a year later the sessions run past a hundred people every week. Mariana came to AI safety and governance from linguistics, and she is a year into a career change that is not finished.
She will not be talking about how to get hired. That process is long and competitive and she is in the middle of it herself. What she has is an account of what comes first, which is reading the work, showing up where it is discussed, and saying yes to something somebody else started. This session is about the part people skip over: the months before you have anything to show, when the field looks closed and waiting until you are ready seems like the sensible choice.
