LESSWRONG
LW

Lightcone InfrastructureRedwood ResearchAICommunityPractical
Personal Blog

95

Apply to the ML for Alignment Bootcamp (MLAB) in Berkeley [Jan 3 - Jan 22]

by habryka, Buck
3rd Nov 2021
AI Alignment Forum
2 min read
4

95

Ω 38

Lightcone InfrastructureRedwood ResearchAICommunityPractical
Personal Blog

95

Ω 38

Apply to the ML for Alignment Bootcamp (MLAB) in Berkeley [Jan 3 - Jan 22]
10philip_b
7habryka
3philip_b
2Bird Concept
New Comment
4 comments, sorted by
top scoring
Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 5:18 PM
[-]philip_b4y100

Being a Russian citizen, if I were to apply for the bootcamp (I am not) and I started applying for a US visa on november 22nd, I would probably not get it in time to attend. Probably, the situation is the same for a large part of the third world. Thus, it would be nice if you announced this earlier and made the application deadline earlier.

Reply
[-]habryka4y70

Yes, sorry! We realized the opportunity to run this over the winter only a few weeks ago, and have been moving as fast as we can since then. There is a decent chance there will be future cohorts, so if anyone is in this situation, they could still apply for future cohorts.

Reply
[-]philip_b4y30

Sure, I understand, no hard feelings.

so if anyone is in this situation, they could still apply for future cohorts.

Do you mean that if one would like to go to such a bootcamp but thinks they won't be able to get visa in time, they should apply now to get invited to a future cohort? Or should they apply later when you actually announce those future cohorts?

Reply
[-]Bird Concept4y20

Do you mean that if one would like to go to such a bootcamp but thinks they won't be able to get visa in time, they should apply now to get invited to a future cohort?

Apply now -- there's a question at the end asking if you're interested in future cohorts. And you can say in the final textbox that you're not available for Round 1. 

Reply
Moderation Log
Curated and popular this week
4Comments

We (Redwood Research and Lightcone Infrastructure) are organizing a bootcamp to bring people interested in AI Alignment up-to-speed with the state of modern ML engineering. We expect to invite about 20 technically talented effective altruists for three weeks of intense learning to Berkeley, taught by engineers working at AI Alignment organizations. The curriculum is designed by Buck Shlegeris (Redwood) and Ned Ruggeri (App Academy Co-founder). We will cover all expenses. 

We aim to have a mixture of students, young professionals, and people who already have a professional track record in AI Alignment or EA, but want to brush up on their Machine Learning skills.

Dates are Jan 3 2022  - Jan 22 2022. Application deadline is November 15th. We will make application decisions on a rolling basis, but will aim to get back to everyone by November 22nd.

Apply here

AI-Generated image (VQGAN+CLIP) for prompt: "Machine Learning Engineering by Alex Hillkurtz", "aquarelle", "Tools", "Graphic Cards", "trending on artstation", "green on white color palette"

The curriculum is still in flux, but this list might give you a sense of the kinds of things we expect to cover (it’s fine if you don’t know all these terms):

  • Week 1: PyTorch — learn the primitives of one of the most popular ML frameworks, use them to reimplement common neural net architecture primitives, optimization algorithms, and data parallelism
  • Week 2: Implementing transformers  — reconstruct GPT2, BERT from scratch, play around with the sub-components and associated algorithms (eg nucleus sampling) to better understand them
  • Week 3: Training transformers — set up a scalable training environment for running experiments, train transformers on various downstream tasks, implement diagnostics, analyze your experiments
  • (Optional) Week 4: Capstone projects

We’re aware that people start school/other commitments at various points in January, and so are flexible about you attending whatever prefix of the bootcamp works for you. 

Logistics

The bootcamp takes place at Constellation, a shared office space in Berkeley for people working on long-termist projects. People from the following organizations often work from the space: MIRI, Redwood Research, Open Philanthropy, Lightcone Infrastructure, Paul Christiano’s Alignment Research Center and more.

As a participant, you’d attend communal lunches and events at Constellation and have a great opportunity to make friends and connections.

If you join the bootcamp, we’ll provide: 

  • Free travel to Berkeley, for both US and international applications
  • Free housing
  • Food
  • Plug-and-play, pre-configured desktop computer with an ML environment for use throughout the bootcamp

You can find a full FAQ and more details in this Google Doc.

Apply here

Mentioned in
63How MATS addresses “mass movement building” concerns
55Interviews on Improving the AI Safety Pipeline
4Critiques of prominent AI safety labs: Redwood Research