Various people have asked me how I made my career decisions, so I wrote up some quick thoughts. (This is mostly intended as a personal reflection, but might be interesting nonetheless to some people here, especially to more junior people trying to figure out their own career options)
I spent a fair bit of time testing fit in different ways while upskilling. This process took ~1.5 years, was a bit bumpy, but was super valuable in helping me figure out what I enjoy the most. Concretely, my progression looked like:
PhD candidate in AI safety
Fellow at MATS 7.0 + extension
Briefly: leading an independent research group
Researcher at the Center on Long-Term Risk
Most recently, working at Arcadia Impact's alignment team
This was motivated by broadly wanting to be a technical AI safety researcher.
I think AI safety is the ideal choice of career, both from a "steering the future" perspective and a "getting personally rewarded" perspective. Within this, I've mostly been optimising for personal fit; doing work that feels joyful / easy to me.
I think my comparative advantage is technical research, since I find it very intellectually fulfilling and I think I'm also pretty good at it.
But that is pretty broad, so it requires further narrowing down...
I value role seniority a lot. Notably this means I prefer a senior position at a "less prestigious" organization to a junior position at an established one.
I benefit a lot from having a high degree of latitude to choose what I want to do. Like Richard Ngo, I have an extreme inability to coerce myself to do things I don't find interesting, so having research freedom is very motivating. Note that freedom / independence is a bit of a double-edged sword, since nobody will stop you from wasting a lot of time. Fortunately, multiple people told me at various points that I seemed to have quite strong research taste.
I also tend to have a very high volume of thoughts / ideas, and if I was a pure IC I would only have the capacity to act on less than 1% of this. I'm pretty suited to being a "serial project starter" where I do the first bit of a project to determine how excited I am by it and then hand it off to someone else.
I value work-life balance a lot.
Doing two fellowships (Neel Nanda's pre-MATS-6 bootcamp, and Owain Evans' MATS 7 stream) made me realise that I burn out quite easily and I need work environments where I am allowed to work at a sustainable pace.
Concretely, my work cadence can be highly variable. Some weeks I have no problem doing 60+ hours of work, others I don't want to touch my work at all. It's much better for me if I am allowed to follow the pace of work I find natural.
I think it's important to be outside the labs.
It seems most important to build robust public knowledge as a prerequisite for enabling society at large to weigh in on discourse. So it's probably bad to be working at labs for this reason, since labs are (in practice) restricted on what they can publish.
I'm wary of bad incentives at labs, which are likely to both affect my object-level thinking and also corrupt my epistemics (see: [1])
I value working with a good, complementary team
I'm pretty ambitious. Whatever organization I join has to have a very compelling vision and be comfortable making big moves towards achieving the stated goals.
Generally I've found that it's pretty rare to come across project collaborators you work really well with; when you find these people you should really treasure them and try to stick with them for a very long time.
Lastly I have some very clear weaknesses, e.g. I think I am not super good at project management, and appreciate support on these fronts
Lastly, I'm not very motivated by monetary compensation, though (all else being equal amongst the above factors) I will of course prefer a role with better compensation.
So putting this together: I have been aiming to get "founding employee" type positions, at independent technical research organizations that maintain an ambitious agenda while providing good work-life balance.
Various people have asked me how I made my career decisions, so I wrote up some quick thoughts. (This is mostly intended as a personal reflection, but might be interesting nonetheless to some people here, especially to more junior people trying to figure out their own career options)
I spent a fair bit of time testing fit in different ways while upskilling. This process took ~1.5 years, was a bit bumpy, but was super valuable in helping me figure out what I enjoy the most. Concretely, my progression looked like:
This was motivated by broadly wanting to be a technical AI safety researcher.
But that is pretty broad, so it requires further narrowing down...
I value role seniority a lot. Notably this means I prefer a senior position at a "less prestigious" organization to a junior position at an established one.
I value work-life balance a lot.
I think it's important to be outside the labs.
I value working with a good, complementary team
Lastly, I'm not very motivated by monetary compensation, though (all else being equal amongst the above factors) I will of course prefer a role with better compensation.
So putting this together: I have been aiming to get "founding employee" type positions, at independent technical research organizations that maintain an ambitious agenda while providing good work-life balance.