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.
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.