Sorry, but asking Jacob about AI extinction risk is like asking your AC guy about climate change. Not saying it's necessarily uninteresting or wrong per se but let’s keep things in perspective and hear from the full range of expertise across the ecosystem!

People often ask me what they should work on. They are in medical school, or work as a software engineer, and they want to know what they ought to do in biology. This is an impossible question for me to answer! I don't know you; I'm not in anybody's head except my own. So I can throw out a bunch of ideas that I find interesting, but most of them won't be interesting to you. The best advice I can give is just to write. I don't mean writing a blog, or writing for others, but writing purely to think through ideas. Set yourself a challenge: Say "I will explore one idea per week — something that I think is interesting — and write a short piece about it." Then set aside 1-2 hours per day to explore that idea and write down what you find. Limit your energy on that idea to just one week; no more. I typically start by writing down a list of questions that I have about the idea. If I was keen to explore, say, bottlenecks in AI for antibody design, then I would start by writing out: "What is an antibody? How do people make them today? Who is using AI to design new antibodies?" Etc. Usually I write down 20-30 questions like this. Then, I spend time researching each question, one at a time. I answer them, write down my responses, and merge everything together into a single article at the very end. The benefit of this daily ritual is that you'll figure out (very fast) whether the idea holds your interest, and whether you want to dig deeper after the one-week "trial." I'd also recommend, while writing, that you reach out to people working on the idea. Send them a focused question, ask to meet, and use writing as a "forcing function" to meet other people. I try to email one new person every day. At the end of the one week, you don't need to publish the article. Most ideas will not feel that exciting to you, and so you can just quietly scrap them. (About 90% of ideas I explore are never published.) But for ideas that hold your attention, consider sending the article to people via email. Say, "Hey, I wrote about this idea. I'm interested in it, and wanted you to read it." Every job I've had in my life has been downstream of writing about an idea and sending it to other people. (I had a mentor at MIT who did a similar thing. Every Saturday, he wrote down three ideas and sent them to influential people. After a few months, he received donations from philanthropists to help grow his new lab.) If you write a little bit every day, you'll quickly find an idea that holds your interest. You will also have used writing as a starting point to talk to people who are working on that idea. How much further is it to now fundraise for the idea? To start a company around it? You've already done a lot of the early work, and are well on your way to figuring out what you ought to be doing.