Do not try to write your first research publication as a single author

TLDR: As a junior technical AI safety researcher, do not try to write and publish your first paper alone; the chances of success on this are very low. Go to SPAR or another part-time research fellowship instead.I facilitate the Blue Dot Technical AI safety course, so I meet many people who want to transition to an AI safety technical researcher career. Usually, people are either from an engineering background or from research in other science areas. A reasonable first main goal for them is to publish their first AI safety research paper at a machine learning conference. Interestingly, often they consider the option to write and publish their first paper alone, before applying to any fellowships. Or they have applied to a high-tier fellowship like MATS, did not get accepted, realized that they need to improve their research skills and researcher’s CV, and decided to write a paper alone.In this post, I argue that writing your first research paper alone is a bad idea, and instead, you should apply to part-time research fellowships like SPAR to write a research paper as part of the team there.I will lay some background on part-time fellowships, then compare fellowships with writing a paper alone, and finally write a bit about useful solo research activities.Part-time technical research fellowships.On a fellowship, you and several other fellows form a team mentored by a senior scientist, working together to produce research results, ideally a publication at a machine learning conference. Most fellowships are ~3 months long. Part-time unpaid online fellowships are less selective than paid full-time fellowships like MATS.Part-time fellowships that I know about: SPAR, AI Safety Camp (AISC), AIgoverse AI safety, Apart fellowship, MARS. The default option is SPAR, it has a 20% acceptance rate when applying to 3-5 projects[1]. The other fellowships listed are more selective.Writing paper alone vs part-time fellowshipOutside view.Here is a list of all papers accepted to NeurIPS