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I do not feel like I am ready to apply for funding yet, but I was wondering are funds (such as Long-Term Future Fund) willing to give extra money to AI safety researchers (which could be spent on travel or luxury) to balance for the opportunity cost of taking an...
Introduction & context I became aware of the AI safety problem around 8 years ago. I was intrigued by it and when I re-read Superintelligence, I decided to get a master's degree in Computer Science (my bachelor's degree is in Information Systems). Shortly after I graduated however, my interest for...
I have around 2-3 years of machine learning engineering industry experience. While I may not be the type of talent to get into OpenAI, I believe I could make some AI safety relevant contributions. I have a strong preference for (fully) remote work or occasionally (once in 3-6 months) live...
Hello LessWrong crew, I am familiar with the ideas of Effective Altruism as I have read the 80,000 Hours career guide. I think it is a great guide and it definitely put a new perspective on the way I view my career. A bit of my background: I have a...
Introduction & context I became aware of the AI safety problem around 8 years ago. I was intrigued by it and when I re-read Superintelligence, I decided to get a master's degree in Computer Science (my bachelor's degree is in Information Systems). Shortly after I graduated however, my interest for AI safety waned. It waned mainly because I felt that I couldn't make a significant contribution if I'm not employed by companies like OpenAI or DeepMind, and I didn't think I really could work there because: * they seem to be hiring people from top-tier American universities (i.e. MIT, Berkley etc.) * I wanted to work remotely, since I'm not from the USA and there are other things besides AI safety research that I want to do with my life After I graduated, I got employed as a machine learning engineer. I have stumbled upon How To Get Into Independent Research On Alignment/Agency and Study Guide, but I kept them in my bookmarks and haven't read them, until now. Very recently, I decided that I'd like to have a stab at being an AI safety researcher. This was mainly due to the fact that I never really tried striking it out on my own and I want to try it. My constraint is that I'm doing this as a side project, alongside my full-time job and other things in my life (gym, social life etc.). The other reason why I haven't tried so far was because I also felt a bit unsure of myself because during my college education, I didn't have some courses such as physics (my physics stopped in high school) and while I did have some math, I never took a test where I had to do multi-dimensional integrals or solve differential equations. I wouldn't say my math background is non-existent, I just felt that people at leading research organizations had a much better background than me and I thought to myself: "What's the point?". With that being said, I recently realized that I'm not getting any younger (I'm 26 now) and that I'd like to at least try to become a professional AI safety research