When it comes to growth, at the moment our focus is on expanding the research team. As such, our next few hires are likely to be research fellows, and assistant research fellows[1] for both our agent foundations and machine learning technical agendas. We have two new research fellows who are signed on to join the team, Abram Demski and Mihály Bárász. Abram and Mihály will both be more focused on the AF agenda, so I’m hoping our next couple hires after them will be on the ML side. We’re prioritizing people who can write well and quickly; if you or someone you know is interested and has that sort of skill, you’re encouraged to get in touch with Alex Vermeer.
As mentioned in MIRI Update and Fundraising Case, which Nate posted here a few days ago, in the medium term our current plan is to grow our research team to 13–17 people. Since we already have a pretty solid ops foundation, I don’t anticipate that we’ll need to increase our ops capacity very much to support a research team of that size, so unless our strategy changes significantly, I expect most of our upcoming hires will be researchers.
[1] At MIRI, research fellow is a full-time permanent position. A decent analogy in academia might be that research fellows are to assistant research fellows as full-time faculty are to post-docs. Assistant research fellowships are intended to be a more junior position with a fixed 1–2 year term.
What would be your next few hires, if resources allow?
When it comes to growth, at the moment our focus is on expanding the research team. As such, our next few hires are likely to be research fellows, and assistant research fellows[1] for both our agent foundations and machine learning technical agendas. We have two new research fellows who are signed on to join the team, Abram Demski and Mihály Bárász. Abram and Mihály will both be more focused on the AF agenda, so I’m hoping our next couple hires after them will be on the ML side. We’re prioritizing people who can write well and quickly; if you or someone you know is interested and has that sort of skill, you’re encouraged to get in touch with Alex Vermeer.
As mentioned in MIRI Update and Fundraising Case, which Nate posted here a few days ago, in the medium term our current plan is to grow our research team to 13–17 people. Since we already have a pretty solid ops foundation, I don’t anticipate that we’ll need to increase our ops capacity very much to support a research team of that size, so unless our strategy changes significantly, I expect most of our upcoming hires will be researchers.
[1] At MIRI, research fellow is a full-time permanent position. A decent analogy in academia might be that research fellows are to assistant research fellows as full-time faculty are to post-docs. Assistant research fellowships are intended to be a more junior position with a fixed 1–2 year term.