I’m Callum—I founded the ARENA program for technical AI safety upskilling, I’ve also worked on various open source mech interp things. I was in Anthropic’s interp team for ~6 months (working on some of their recent papers) and I’m currently doing interp at DeepMind. I like mathematical art, running, climbing, and most importantly I hold a Guinness World Record for the largest number of clothespegs held in one hand at once (yep, really).
Callum McDougall
Karma: 440
ARENA 7.0 - Call for Applicants
New Cause Area Proposal
AI Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator (ARENA): Call for applicants v4.0
How ARENA course material gets made
A Selection of Randomly Selected SAE Features
AI Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator (ARENA): call for applicants
Not forcing myself to be productive when I don’t feel like it. Recognising when I’m feeling like I need to do nothing for a few hours or even a day, and giving myself allowance to do that. Much better to double down when I am feeling productive, than forcing myself to work when I don’t.
(Obviously ymmv, and I’m lucky enough to have a job where I can make this kind of system work for me, I’m aware not everyone does.)
ARENA 2.0 - Impact Report
An Analogy for Understanding Transformers
A tourist visa will be enough, I believe. We’ll be helping out participants with this process.
AI Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator (ARENA): call for applicants
Yep, Excalidraw is great! I also used it to make this post:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TvrfY4c9eaGLeyDkE/induction-heads-illustrated
Sorry for the delay, yep sure! Here’s the link: https://join.slack.com/t/join-asap/shared_invite/zt-1kkzoa53n-ImLZZpiM9L2uoV_bH7Oh2A
and I’ll also update it in the post.
Thanks! Will fix now. I really should set a repeating reminder for myself lol
Yep thanks for mentioning this, it did come up in the discussion on the Slack group and definitely updated me towards Discord. The vote for whether we should use Slack or Discord did end up going in favour of Slack by a margin of 14 votes to 6, so we’ll be sticking with Slack for now, but we might revisit the issue in the future if there’s good reason to (e.g. the 90 day history thing proves a significant inconvenience).
AI Risk Intro 2: Solving The Problem
Thanks for commenting! Yep the link seems to have expired, this one should work (and the post is now updated).
Thanks for commenting! Yep the link seems to have expired, this one should work (and the post is now updated).
I’ll copy in my response from EA Groups Slack:
Yeah I’m aware that there are arguments against Slack on these kinds of bases. From my perspective, Discord has 2 main annoyances: (1) worse formatting options in messages (e.g. no links in text) and more importantly (2) no reply threads, which can make messages really cluttered. I’ve mentioned in the slack already that I’d be willing to cover costs if it comes to that
I’d be open to changing my mind on these points though, if I found that Discord had those features or close alternatives
Thanks Artyom for sending this! Yes, we expect people to be participating full time in the virtual program. We will also try to clearly indicate sections of the material which are more important than others, and structure things in such a way that missing out on one day wouldn’t mean falling behind on the curriculum overall.