What do you count as software engineering experience? The linked LinkedIn profile looks like he has > 10 years of experience in the field.
Our critique on lack of senior ML staff is focused specifically on lack of machine learning expertise (as opposed to general TAIS work). We are counting substantive software engineering experience such as his work at PayPal and TripleByte.
On the topic of general TAIS experience, I think Buck has at most 7 years experience as he joined MIRI in 2017. (It is our understanding that a decent portion of his time at MIRI was spent recruiting). That being said, years of experience is not the only measure of experience, Jacob Steinhardt comments above that he believes Buck is “a stronger researcher than most people with ML PhDs. He is weaker at empirical ML than this baseline, but very strong conceptually in ways that translate well to machine learning.”
Can you confirm that Redwood really fired them as opposed to them quitting? (The first is unusual in my experience; the second very common.) You mention employees quitting in various places but because they’re anonymous, I can’t tell whether that refers to the same people. Thanks!
To our knowledge, their more experienced ML research staff were let go. We refer to different employees quitting at later stages. In an earlier draft we had named a few of them, but decided to remove the names due to anonymity concerns.
Hi Dawn!
Our critique on lack of senior ML staff is focused specifically on lack of machine learning expertise (as opposed to general TAIS work). We are counting substantive software engineering experience such as his work at PayPal and TripleByte.
On the topic of general TAIS experience, I think Buck has at most 7 years experience as he joined MIRI in 2017. (It is our understanding that a decent portion of his time at MIRI was spent recruiting). That being said, years of experience is not the only measure of experience, Jacob Steinhardt comments above that he believes Buck is “a stronger researcher than most people with ML PhDs. He is weaker at empirical ML than this baseline, but very strong conceptually in ways that translate well to machine learning.”
To our knowledge, their more experienced ML research staff were let go. We refer to different employees quitting at later stages. In an earlier draft we had named a few of them, but decided to remove the names due to anonymity concerns.
Thanks for clarifying!
I’m still so confused about the second point, but you probably also don’t know the details of what happened there.