I have ~2 months off and am considering intro courses in stats and probability, game theory, or data science. I’m open to other recommendations, of course!
This might be too elementary for you, but in college I benefited from Model Thinking by Scott Page. It’s a breezy introduction to a long list of popular models used in the social and empirical sciences, and I think plausibly had a small effect on my general perspective of trying to see the world in terms of many simple models (vs eg “model-free” intuitions, or a single grand overarching model).
I’ll be starting as an operations and research assistant at the Centre on Long-Term Risk in a few months, where I’ll probably help out with AI governance topics related to multi-agent RL.
But I’m open to doing courses that are generally useful and engaging!
I think if you will be working on multi-agent RL and haven’t played around with deep learning models, you will likely find it helpful. You code up a python model that gets increasingly complicated until it does things like attempting to identify a cat (if I’m remembering it correctly). It’s fairly ‘hands on’ but also somewhat accessible to people without a technical background.
Friends of mine starting out at both CSET and OpenAI worked through it and found it helpful to get context as they moved into their new roles.
I’d second the Ng Coursera course—very straightforward and easy to follow for those lacking technical backgrounds! Which may be a plus or a minus, depending on your desired rigor.
Do people have online courses to recommend?
I have ~2 months off and am considering intro courses in stats and probability, game theory, or data science. I’m open to other recommendations, of course!
This might be too elementary for you, but in college I benefited from Model Thinking by Scott Page. It’s a breezy introduction to a long list of popular models used in the social and empirical sciences, and I think plausibly had a small effect on my general perspective of trying to see the world in terms of many simple models (vs eg “model-free” intuitions, or a single grand overarching model).
Hi Jia,
There’s a lot of options! Could you clarify which problem areas do you want to work on, and which longer-term career paths are you most interested in?
Hi Ben,
I’ll be starting as an operations and research assistant at the Centre on Long-Term Risk in a few months, where I’ll probably help out with AI governance topics related to multi-agent RL.
But I’m open to doing courses that are generally useful and engaging!
Hey Jia, I haven’t done many online courses, but one that I did and enjoyed was the Coursera Deep Learning course with Andrew Ng. https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning
I think if you will be working on multi-agent RL and haven’t played around with deep learning models, you will likely find it helpful. You code up a python model that gets increasingly complicated until it does things like attempting to identify a cat (if I’m remembering it correctly). It’s fairly ‘hands on’ but also somewhat accessible to people without a technical background.
Friends of mine starting out at both CSET and OpenAI worked through it and found it helpful to get context as they moved into their new roles.
I’d second the Ng Coursera course—very straightforward and easy to follow for those lacking technical backgrounds! Which may be a plus or a minus, depending on your desired rigor.