I think "big academic research" is almost certainly not safe, for reasons similar to my argument to Paul here. There are people who do not care about AI safety due to short planning horizons or because they think they have simple, easy to transmit values, and will deploy the results of such research before the AI safety work is complete.

Of course, this may or may not be safe, but there may come a time when it turns out that it is the least risky alternative.

This would be a fine argument if there weren't immediate downsides to what MIRI is currently doing, namely shortening AI timelines and making it harder to create a singleton (or get significant human intelligence enhancement, which could help somewhat in the absence of a singleton) before AGI work starts ramping up.