Have you considered doing this for a while if you think it’s possibly the most important problem, i.e. for example trying to develop concrete problems that can then be raised to the fields of ML and AI?
Indeed, I think that would be a good objective for the postdoc. It’s also true that I think this is the kind of thing we need to do to make progress in the field, and my intuition is that aiming for academic papers should be necessary to increase quality.
Cool, I’d personally be very glad if you would contribute to this. Hmm, I wonder whether a plausible next step could be to work on this independently for a couple months to try how much you like doing the work. Maybe you could do this part-time while staying at your current job?
Unfortunately, this is not feasible: I am finishing my Ph.D. and have to decide what I am doing next in the next couple of weeks.
In any case, my impression is that to pose good questions I need a couple of years of understanding the field of expertise, so things are tractable, state of the art, concretely defined...
Ah, dang. And how difficult would it be to do reject the startup offer, independently and remotely work on concretizing AI safety problem full-time for a couple of months and testing your fit, and then if you don’t feel like this is clearly the best use of your time you can (I image) very easily get another job offer in the quantum computing field?
(Btw I’m still somewhat confused why AI safety research is supposed to be in much friction with working remotely at least most of the time.)
Ah, dang. And how difficult would it be to do reject the startup offer, independently and remotely work on concretizing AI safety problems full-time for a couple of months and testing your fit, and then if you don’t feel like this is clearly the best use of your time you can (I image) very easily get another job offer in the quantum computing field?
The thing that worries me is working on some specific technical progress, not being able to make sufficient progress, and feeling stuck. But I think this will happen after more than 2 months, perhaps after a year. I’m thinking of it more in academic terms; I would like to target academic-quality papers.
But perhaps if that happens I could come back to quantum computing or any other boring computer scientist job.
(Btw I’m still somewhat confused why AI safety research is supposed to be in much friction with working remotely at least most of the time.)
The main reason is that if I go to a place where people are working in technical AI Safety I will get to speed with the AI/ML part faster if I am there. So it’d be for learning purposes.
Indeed, I think that would be a good objective for the postdoc. It’s also true that I think this is the kind of thing we need to do to make progress in the field, and my intuition is that aiming for academic papers should be necessary to increase quality.
Cool, I’d personally be very glad if you would contribute to this. Hmm, I wonder whether a plausible next step could be to work on this independently for a couple months to try how much you like doing the work. Maybe you could do this part-time while staying at your current job?
Unfortunately, this is not feasible: I am finishing my Ph.D. and have to decide what I am doing next in the next couple of weeks. In any case, my impression is that to pose good questions I need a couple of years of understanding the field of expertise, so things are tractable, state of the art, concretely defined...
Ah, dang. And how difficult would it be to do reject the startup offer, independently and remotely work on concretizing AI safety problem full-time for a couple of months and testing your fit, and then if you don’t feel like this is clearly the best use of your time you can (I image) very easily get another job offer in the quantum computing field?
(Btw I’m still somewhat confused why AI safety research is supposed to be in much friction with working remotely at least most of the time.)
The thing that worries me is working on some specific technical progress, not being able to make sufficient progress, and feeling stuck. But I think this will happen after more than 2 months, perhaps after a year. I’m thinking of it more in academic terms; I would like to target academic-quality papers. But perhaps if that happens I could come back to quantum computing or any other boring computer scientist job.
The main reason is that if I go to a place where people are working in technical AI Safety I will get to speed with the AI/ML part faster if I am there. So it’d be for learning purposes.