Hi Bruce, thanks for this thoughtful comment. We think Conjecture needs to address key concerns before we would recommend working there, although we could imagine Conjecture being the best option for a small fraction of people who are (a) excited by their current CoEm approach, (b) can operate independently in an environment with limited mentorship, (c) are confident they can withstand internal pressure (if there is a push to work on capabilities). As a result of these (and other) comments in this comment thread, we will be updating our recommendation to work at Conjecture.
That being said, we expect it to be rare that an individual would have an offer from Conjecture but not have access to other opportunities that are better than independent research. In practice many organizations end up competing for the same, relatively small pool of the very top candidates. Our guess is that most individuals who could receive an offer from Conjecture could pursue one of the paths outlined above in our replies to Marius such as being a research assistant or PhD student in academia, or working in an ML engineering position in an applied team at a major tech company (if not from more promising places like the ones we discuss in the original post). We think these positions can absorb a fairly large amount of talent, although we note that most AI/​ML fields are fairly competitive.
Hi Bruce, thanks for this thoughtful comment. We think Conjecture needs to address key concerns before we would recommend working there, although we could imagine Conjecture being the best option for a small fraction of people who are (a) excited by their current CoEm approach, (b) can operate independently in an environment with limited mentorship, (c) are confident they can withstand internal pressure (if there is a push to work on capabilities). As a result of these (and other) comments in this comment thread, we will be updating our recommendation to work at Conjecture.
That being said, we expect it to be rare that an individual would have an offer from Conjecture but not have access to other opportunities that are better than independent research. In practice many organizations end up competing for the same, relatively small pool of the very top candidates. Our guess is that most individuals who could receive an offer from Conjecture could pursue one of the paths outlined above in our replies to Marius such as being a research assistant or PhD student in academia, or working in an ML engineering position in an applied team at a major tech company (if not from more promising places like the ones we discuss in the original post). We think these positions can absorb a fairly large amount of talent, although we note that most AI/​ML fields are fairly competitive.