Are successes at the IMO a reliable and objective measure of the skills you need?
Well, of course, this is a major filter for intelligence, creativity and plain math "basic front kick" proficiency. However, you also exclude lots and lots of people who may possess the necessary skills but did not choose to enter IMO, were not aware of it, had other personal commitments or simply procrastinated too much etc. Also, the skills IMO medalists have acquired so far are in no way a guarantee that more skills will follow, and may be the result of good teachers or enthusiastic parents. Let me present you some weak evidence, behold, a personal anecdote!
On behalf of my chemistry teacher and owed to my school's policy in general, I entered one of these sciency olympiads a while ago. I procrastinated over the first round, which was a homework assignment, got it in just in time not quite completed, but was allowed to the next round. From there on, I made it to the national team and won a medal at the international competition. Looking back on what I did back then, I'd say the questions were quite easy, not at a level I'd call requiring serious skill. Of course I've continued to learn much since then, but it could've gone another way. I would not say such medal winners are overly altruistic or more determined to their cause than others are (the two of my teammates that I know about are now studying medicine, "to make money" as they told me).
I'd conclude that if you want bright mathematicians, you might be well off taking IMO medalists. But if you want people who are also trustworthy, altruistic and deeply committed to AGI, let alone especially rational, you should probably widen the filter for intelligence and math skills (if IMO medals are a good measure of this) a lot. Perhaps ask Mensa, take applications and filter from those, reach out to the best 1% on some college entry test or something. Just wild, uneducated guesses. But focussing on IMO medalists, which should give you less than 500 potential candidates a year, doesn't sound like a good strategy. More so since those people are approached not only by you but also by quite a few companies.
Perhaps I misunderstood what you mean with "at medal-winning level", but since you're doing this SPARC camp and I can't think of another way of attracting such people, I assumed you were reaching out to people who actually compete.
I said "the IMO medal-winning level."
IMO performance isn't the only metric which strongly predicts elite math ability.
Series: How to Purchase AI Risk Reduction
A key part of SI's strategy for AI risk reduction is to build toward hosting a Friendly AI development team at the Singularity Institute.
I don't take it to be obvious that an SI-hosted FAI team is the correct path toward the endgame of humanity "winning." That is a matter for much strategic research and debate.
Either way, I think that building toward an FAI team is good for AI risk reduction, even if we decide (later) that an SI-hosted FAI team is not the best thing to do. Why is this so?
Building toward an SI-hosted FAI team means:
Both (1) and (2) are useful for AI risk reduction even if an SI-hosted FAI team turns out not to be the best strategy.
This is because: Achieving part (1) would make SI more effective at whatever it is doing to reduce AI risk, and achieving part (2) would bring great human resources to the cause of AI risk reduction, which will be useful to a wide range of purposes (FAI team or otherwise).
So, how do we accomplish both these things?
Growing SI into a better organization
Like many (most?) non-profits with less than $1m/yr in funding, SI has had difficulty attracting the top-level executive talent often required to build a highly efficient and effective organization. Luckily, we have made rapid progress on this front in the past 9 months. For example we now have (1) a comprehensive donor database, (2) a strategic plan, (3) a team of remote contractors used to more efficiently complete large and varied projects requiring many different skillsets, (4) an increasingly "best practices" implementation of central management, (5) an office we actually use to work together on projects, and many other improvements.
What else can SI do to become a tighter, larger, and more effective organization?
They key point, of course, is that all these things cost money. They may be "boring," but they are incredibly important.
Attracting and creating superhero mathematicians
The kind of people we'd need for an FAI team are:
There are other criteria, too, but those are some of the biggest.
We can attract some of the people meeting these criteria by using the methods described in Reaching young math/compsci talent. The trouble is that the number of people on Earth who qualify may be very close to 0 (especially given the "committed to AI risk reduction" criterion).
Thus, we'll need to create some superhero mathematicians.
Math ability seems to be even more "fixed" than the other criteria, so a (very rough) strategy for creating superhero mathematicians might look like this:
All these steps, too, cost money.