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All of Jason Maskell's Comments + Replies

AGI Safety FAQ / all-dumb-questions-allowed thread
Jason Maskell10

Thanks, that's a super helpful reading list and a hell of a deep rabbit hole. Cheers.

I'm currently skilling up my rusty ML skills and will start looking in earnest in the next couple of months for new employment in this field. Thanks for the job board link as well.

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AGI Safety FAQ / all-dumb-questions-allowed thread
Jason Maskell20

Is that true for Redwood? They've got a timed technical screen before application, and their interview involves live coding with Python and ML libraries.

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2Yonatan Cale
I talked to Buck from Redwood about 1 month ago and that's what he told me, and I think we went over this as "a really important point" more than once so I'd know if I misunderstood him (but still please tell me if I'm wrong). I assume if you tell them that you have zero ML experience, they'll give you an interview without ML libraries, or perhaps something very simple with ML libraries that you could learn on the fly (just like you could learn web scraping or so). This part is just me speculating though. Anyway this is something you could ask them before your first technical interview for sure: "Hey, I have zero ML experience, do you still want to interview me?"
AGI Safety FAQ / all-dumb-questions-allowed thread
Jason Maskell13-4

Fair warning, this question is a bit redundant.

I'm a greybeard engineer  (30+ YOE) working in games. For many years now, I've wanted to transition to working in AGI as I'm one of those starry-eyed optimists that thinks we might survive the Singularity. 

Well I should say I used to, and then I read AGI Ruin. Now I feel like if I want my kids to have a planet that's not made of Computronium I should probably get involved. (Yes, I know the kids would be Computronium as well.)

So a couple practical questions: 

What can I read/look at to skill up wi... (read more)

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2Rachel Freedman
A good place to start is the "AGI Safety Fundamentals" course reading list, which includes materials from a diverse set of AI safety research agendas. Reading this can help you figure out who in this space is doing what, and which of that you think is useful.  You can also join an official iteration of the course if you want to discuss the materials with a cohort and a facilitator (you can register interest for that here). You can also join the AI Alignment slack, to discuss these and other materials and meet others who are interested in working on AI safety. I'm not sure what qualifies as "dark horse", but there are plenty of AI safety organizations interested in hiring research engineers and software engineers. For these roles, your engineering skills and safety motivation typically matter more than your experience in the community. Places off the top of my head that hire engineers for AI safety work: Redwood, Anthropic, FAR, OpenAI, DeepMind. I'm sure I've missed others, though, so look around! These sorts of opportunities are also usually posted on the 80k job board and in AI Alignment slack.
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2Yonatan Cale
You can also apply to Redwood Research ( +1 for applying to Anthropic! )