Scott Aaronson is a computer scientist at the University of Texas in Austin, whose research mainly focuses on quantum computing and complexity theory. He's at least very adjacent to the Rationalist/LessWrong community. After some comments on his blog and then coversations with Jan Leike, he's decided work for one year on AI safety at OpenAI.
To me this is a reasonable update that people who are sympathetic to AI safety can be convinced to actually do direct work.
Aaronson might be one of the easier people to induce to do AI safety work, but I imagine there are also other people who are worth talking to about doing direct work on AI safety.
I've also been perplexed by the focus on Tao in particular. In fact, I've long thought that if it's a good idea to recruit a top mathematician to alignment, then Peter Scholze would be a better choice since
That said, I'm quite confident that Scholze is too busy revolutionizing everything he touches in mathematics to be interested in switching to alignment, so this is all moot.
(Also, I recognize that playing the "which one mathematician would be the single best to recruit to alignment?" game is not actually particularly useful, but it's been a pet peeve of mine for a while that Tao is the poster child of the push to recruit a mathematician, hence this comment.)