As someone who gives data science interviews, my (personal, unreliable) opinion is that you should start preparing for interviews as soon as possible, and actually begin interviewing as soon as you feel ready.
I'm not saying you'll get in on the first try! You might, in which case you'll save a lot of effort doing anything else. If not, you'll get some sense of what the interview process is like, and where your strengths and weaknesses are.
If you can't get interviews at all, you may need to think about improving your resume. That could look like options 1, or 2, or 4 if you can swing it; the details probably depend a lot on your personal circumstances.
If you can get interviews, but not jobs, you should probably work on your interview technique. For early-career hires, we care more about how the interview and practical exercise go than anything else. (Remember to ask the interviewers for feedback at the end, e.g. "is there anything you think I could improve on?")
If you want to go get some super-impressive experience, that's not a bad thing, it's certainly going to make us more interested; that said, it's a large amount of work to do so convincingly, and it won't save you if you can't impress on the more routine parts of the interview.
Also, don't feel you have to sell your existing experience short: "I did some clever feature engineering that resulted in a better model for our data" is actually a pretty good answer. I can't speak for AI safety, but there are lots of other opportunities that would be happy to have someone who knows their way around a dataset.
If you're not sure how to explain it, then practise that! You're going to be evaluated on your communication as much as anything else, and explaining technical concepts to people who don't understand them is often part of the job. They won't need to know it inside-out, just give them a sense of what's going on, and why your efforts mattered.
Strongly agree with tangren. Try to start interviewing and see if:
I will caution that right now is probably a particularly difficult time to find an engineering job. There were a lot of layoffs in big tech companies and a lot of them have a hiring freeze.
I was expecting great things when I graduated from high school. I scored 35 on the ACT, was messing around with crypto, and fully expected to drop out of college to start a business. Things were looking up.
Instead, due to a combination of depression and procrastination, I ended up spending the next 8 years drifting in and out of college before I finally got my undergraduate degree. I wish I was out partying during this time since that would at least give me some good memories, but I honestly just stayed inside and played video games all day. Not my proudest decade.
But eventually, I pulled myself together and graduated. I've been employed as a bioinformatics engineer in China for the past 2 years, and have been steadily improving my life. I'm contributing to group discussions, pointing out major problems with research plans, and picking up programming and data management skills. Instead of putting in minimal effort, I'm spending most of my workday coding or researching, an incredible improvement over my productivity in college. I feel like a highly valued member of my team. I've published papers, helped design gene panels for cancer treatment, and sifted through papers for new research avenues for my team to pursue.
And then I remembered that I was making what would be considered minimum wage in the US. I know I can do better. I also don't want the possibility of a multi-month lockdown starting at any time to hang over my head. I have a passion for AI and want to pursue a career in programming/data science in the West. Since many of you are involved in these fields, do you have any recommendations? I see 3 paths forward: