Context: I work as an alignment researcher. Mostly with language models.
I consider myself very risk-averse, but I also personally struggled (and still do) with the instability of alignment. There’s just so many things I feel like I’m sacrificing to work in the field and being an independent researcher right now feels so shaky. That said, I’ve weighed the pros and cons and still feel like it’s worth it for me. This was only something I truly felt in my bones a few months after taking the leap. It was in the back of my mind for ~5 years (and two 80k coaching calls) before I decided to try it out.
With respect to your engineering skills, I’m going to start to work on tools that are explicitly designed for alignment researchers (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a2io2mcxTWS4mxodF/results-from-a-survey-on-tool-use-and-workflows-in-alignment) and having designers and programmers (web devs) would probably be highly beneficial. Unfortunately, I only have funding for myself for the time being. But it would be great to have some people who want to contribute. I’d consider doing AI Safety mentorship as a work trade.
I honestly feel like software devs could probably still keep their high-paying jobs and just donate a bit of time and expertise to help independent researchers if they want to start contributing to AI Safety.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! It’s helpful to know that others have been struggling with a similar situation.
Through investigating the need and potential for projects, it seems there are vaguely two main areas for engineers:
Research engineering, it seems to be essentially helping researchers build prototypes and run models as smoothly as possible.
Various meta-projects that grow the talent pool or enable knowledge to be gained and shared more efficiently. The ones in the post you linked fall under this.
It seems like getting (more useful) summaries of papers and blog posts is in very high demand. I wonder if Elicit (https://elicit.org/) is useful enough to somewhat alleviate that problem already.
I also came across this list of engineering project ideas while investigating: https://alignment.dev/
I’m thinking that working on one of these could be a useful entry point. It seems viable to do while studying the field itself.
Context: I work as an alignment researcher. Mostly with language models.
I consider myself very risk-averse, but I also personally struggled (and still do) with the instability of alignment. There’s just so many things I feel like I’m sacrificing to work in the field and being an independent researcher right now feels so shaky. That said, I’ve weighed the pros and cons and still feel like it’s worth it for me. This was only something I truly felt in my bones a few months after taking the leap. It was in the back of my mind for ~5 years (and two 80k coaching calls) before I decided to try it out.
With respect to your engineering skills, I’m going to start to work on tools that are explicitly designed for alignment researchers (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a2io2mcxTWS4mxodF/results-from-a-survey-on-tool-use-and-workflows-in-alignment) and having designers and programmers (web devs) would probably be highly beneficial. Unfortunately, I only have funding for myself for the time being. But it would be great to have some people who want to contribute. I’d consider doing AI Safety mentorship as a work trade.
I honestly feel like software devs could probably still keep their high-paying jobs and just donate a bit of time and expertise to help independent researchers if they want to start contributing to AI Safety.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! It’s helpful to know that others have been struggling with a similar situation.
Through investigating the need and potential for projects, it seems there are vaguely two main areas for engineers:
Research engineering, it seems to be essentially helping researchers build prototypes and run models as smoothly as possible.
Various meta-projects that grow the talent pool or enable knowledge to be gained and shared more efficiently. The ones in the post you linked fall under this.
It seems like getting (more useful) summaries of papers and blog posts is in very high demand. I wonder if Elicit (https://elicit.org/) is useful enough to somewhat alleviate that problem already.
I also came across this list of engineering project ideas while investigating: https://alignment.dev/
I’m thinking that working on one of these could be a useful entry point. It seems viable to do while studying the field itself.