Very glad you're interested! Here are some good places to start:
[removed due to being too badly misleading, will hopefully come back and replace eventually]
This place is a good choice to ask if you want to work on a very specific subset of AI Safety/Alignment problems. If you want to work on AI Capabilities I don't think this is the place to ask - consensus among the people here is "the best way right now to work on AI Capabilities is to don't".
I am a senior CS/Math student at UMD, college park, and I "specialized" my major in machine learning. I have taken courses on Deep Learning and NLP, reinforcement learning, however I still feel like a novice in all of these categories, my proudest achievement being this half-ripped off sudoku CNN I trained that only achieved like 90% accuracy.
All that being said I want to contribute to the ever progressing world of AI and ML, and I want to know where I should even begin. I would be entirely fine being sent on a super random and likely incorrect path, just to rule out that a method does not work.
I have deliberated beginning my own projects trying to create Transformer networks or RL implementations, but it all feels a little daunting and arguably useless. Who am I to be able to work alone and come up with something truly useful in heavily researched fields.
What should I work on. Where can someone like myself, who is not currently pursuing further education or research get involved and help the ML/AI society?
P.S. shoutout Lex Fridman and Eliezer Yudkowsky, without their recent podcast together I do not think I would have found this platform.