Top line: If you think you could write a substantial pull request for a major machine learning library, then major AI safety labs want to interview you today.

I work for Anthropic, an industrial AI research lab focussed on safety. We are bottlenecked on aligned engineering talent. Specifically engineering talent. While we'd always like more ops folk and more researchers, our safety work is limited by a shortage of great engineers.

I've spoken to several other AI safety research organisations who feel the same.

Why engineers?

May last year, OpenAI released GPT-3, a system that did surprisingly well at a surprisingly broad range of tasks. While limited in many important ways, a lot of AI safety folk sat up and noticed. Systems like GPT-3 might not themselves be the existential threat that many of us are worried about, but it's plausible that some of the issues that will be found in such future systems might already be present in GPT-3, and it's plausible to think solving those issues in GPT-3 will help us solve equivalent issues in those future systems that we are worried about.

As such, AI safety has suddenly developed an empirical subfield. While before we could only make predictions about what might go wrong and how we might fix those things, now we can actually run experiments! Experiments are not and should never be the entirety of the field, but it's a new and promising direction that leverages a different skill set to more 'classic' AI safety.

In particular, the different skill set it leverages is engineering. Running experiments on a real - if weak - AI system requires a substantial stack of custom software, with projects running from hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code. Dealing with these projects is not a skillset that many folks in AI safety had invested in prior to the last 18 months, and it shows in our recruitment.

What kind of engineers?

Looking at the engineers at Anthropic right now, every one of them was a great software engineer prior to joining AI safety. Every one of them is also easy to get on with. Beyond that, common traits are

experience with distributed systems
experience with numerical systems
caring about, and thinking a lot about, about AI safety
comfortable reading contemporary ML research papers
expertise in security, infrastructure, data, numerics, social science, or one of a dozen other hard-to-find specialities.

This is not a...

timbuckley

timbuckley

timbuckley

timbuckley