Five months ago, I received a grant from the Long Term Future Fund to upskill in AI alignment. As of a few days ago, I was invited to Berkeley for two months of full-time alignment research under Owain Evans’s stream in the SERIMATS program. This post is about how I got there.

The post is partially a retrospective for myself, and partially a sketch of the path I took so that others can decide if it’s right for them. This post was written relatively quickly - I’m happy to answer more questions via PM or in the comments.

Summary

I was a software engineer for 3-4 years with little to no ML experience before I was accepted for my grant.
I did a bunch of stuff around fundamental ML maths, understanding RL and transformers, and improving my alignment understanding.
Having tutors, getting feedback on my plan early on, and being able to pivot as I went were all very useful for not getting stuck doing stuff that was no longer useful.
I probably wouldn’t have gotten into SERIMATS without that ability to pivot midway through.
After SERIMATS, I want to finish off the last part of the grant while I find work, then start work as a Research Engineer at an alignment organisation.
If in doubt, put in an application!

My Background

My background is more professional and less academic than most. Until I was 23, I didn’t do much of anything - then I got a Bachelor of Computer Science from a university ranked around 1,000th, with little maths and no intent to study ML at all, let alone alignment. It was known for strong graduate employment though, so I went straight into industry from there. I had 3.5 years of software engineering experience (1.5 at Amazon, 2 as a senior engineer at other jobs) before applying for the LTFF grant. I had no ML experience at the time, besides being halfway through doing the fast.ai course in my spare time.

Not going to lie, seeing how many Top-20 university PhD students I was sharing my cohort with (At least three!) was a tad intimidating - but I made it in the end, so industry experience clearly has a role to play as well.

Grant

The details of the grant are one of the main reasons I wrote this - I’ve been asked for 1:1’s and details on this at least three times in the last six months, and if you get asked something from at least three different people, it might be worth writing it up and sharing it around.

Firstly, the process. Applying...

Ulisse Mini's Shortform

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Ulisse Mini's Shortform

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