Skill up and work on technical AI safety! Two good resources: 1, 2. Even if you don’t yet feel the moral urgency, skilling up in ML can put you in a better position to do technical research in the future.
Thanks for the suggestion! I have actually spent quite a lot of time thinking about this—I had my 80k call last April and this was their advice. I’ve hesitated against doing this for a number of reasons:
I’m worried that even if I do upskill in ML, I won’t be a good enough software engineer to land a research engineering position, so part of me wants to improve as a SWE first
At the moment I’m very busy and a marginal hour of my time is very valuable, upskilling in ML is likely 200-500 hours, at the moment I would struggle to commit to even 5 hours per week
I don’t know whether I would enjoy ML, whereas I know I somewhat enjoy at least some parts of the SWE work I currently do
Learning ML potentially narrows my career options vs learning broader skills, so it’s hard to hedge
My impression is that there are a lot of people trying to do this right now, and it’s not clear to me that doing so would be my comparative advantage. Perhaps carving out a different niche would be more valuable in the future.
There are probably good rebuttals to at least some of these points, and I think that is adding to my confusion. My intuition is to keep doing what I’m currently doing, rather than go try and learn ML, but maybe my intuition here is bad.
Edit: writing this comment made me realise that I ought to write a proper doc with the pros/cons of learning ML and get feedback on it if necessary. Thanks for helping pull this useful thought out of my brain :)
Skill up and work on technical AI safety! Two good resources: 1, 2. Even if you don’t yet feel the moral urgency, skilling up in ML can put you in a better position to do technical research in the future.
Thanks for the suggestion! I have actually spent quite a lot of time thinking about this—I had my 80k call last April and this was their advice. I’ve hesitated against doing this for a number of reasons:
I’m worried that even if I do upskill in ML, I won’t be a good enough software engineer to land a research engineering position, so part of me wants to improve as a SWE first
At the moment I’m very busy and a marginal hour of my time is very valuable, upskilling in ML is likely 200-500 hours, at the moment I would struggle to commit to even 5 hours per week
I don’t know whether I would enjoy ML, whereas I know I somewhat enjoy at least some parts of the SWE work I currently do
Learning ML potentially narrows my career options vs learning broader skills, so it’s hard to hedge
My impression is that there are a lot of people trying to do this right now, and it’s not clear to me that doing so would be my comparative advantage. Perhaps carving out a different niche would be more valuable in the future.
There are probably good rebuttals to at least some of these points, and I think that is adding to my confusion. My intuition is to keep doing what I’m currently doing, rather than go try and learn ML, but maybe my intuition here is bad.
Edit: writing this comment made me realise that I ought to write a proper doc with the pros/cons of learning ML and get feedback on it if necessary. Thanks for helping pull this useful thought out of my brain :)