See Jacob's Leave of Absence FAQ for full context! Here are some relevant excerpts:

After two years as a Stanford student, this fall I'm declaring a leave of absence!
...
My main focus for at least the next couple months (I'm pretty unsure after that) will be co-leading the Stanford AI Alignment club (which is rebranding soon!) and trying to make it go extremely well.
...
I currently think it's pretty likely that I'll take a full gap year for 2026-27. With that said, I'm really fortunate to have Stanford as a safety net.

...
After that, I'm quite unsure what I'll do. I could see myself being torn between two considerations:

The case for going back to school

It's so logical and normal to take one year off and then go back to school! I won't be coming back to college when weirdly old, and I'll be able to maintain a normal college trajectory, graduating in 2029. After some time Out In The World, I'll have a better sense of what I want out of my college experience. I generally like learning, and in many ways I like the college environment.

Going back to school is, in some sense, my default plan. It's the option I'll choose if I don't have a better one (though I guess that's tautological). It just feels like living the good life that I want to live.

When I first started drafting this post on Stanford campus back in April, I took great pains to insist that "I really am planning to go back to school" and that I probably wouldn't drop out.

The case for not going back to school

The world might be too crazy. Short AI timelines don't feel like science fiction anymore, and I have this fear that even if I want to go back to school, it might feel obviously ridiculous, especially if I'm equipped to do meaningful work in AI safety.

My hope is that if I end up deciding not to go back, either (a) I will be doing something sufficiently cool or (b) the world will be sufficiently crazy that going back to college would be the crazy thing. But it also might be murkier, and I think it's likely that I'd be able to have a bigger positive impact on the world regardless by doing AI safety full-time. I might have to have a serious reckoning between positive world impact and life satisfaction.

As I sit here writing this in the heart of AIsafetyworld (Berkeley, California), surrounded by positive-impact-maxers and top AI forecasters ... I'm not going to lie, their prognosis of the future feels rather urgent and grim, and I feel like there are many ways to have an impact, to the point that going back to school would be lunacy.

But I don't know yet. Only time will tell.

General policy for my markets: In the rare event of a conflict between my resolution criteria and the agreed-upon common-sense spirit of the market, I may resolve it according to the market's spirit or N/A, probably after discussion.