Anthropic says that they’re looking for experienced engineers who are able to dive into an unfamiliar codebase and solve nasty bags and/or are able to handle interesting problems with distributed systems and parallel processing. I was personally surprised to get an internship offer from CHAI and expected the bar for getting an AI safety role to be much higher. I’d guess that the average person able to get a software engineering job at Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc. (not that I’ve ever received an offer from any of those companies), or perhaps a broader category of people, could do useful direct work, especially if they committed time to gaining relevant skills if necessary. But I might be wrong. (This is all assuming that Anthropic, Redwood, CHAI, etc. are doing useful alignment work.)
Anthropic says that they’re looking for experienced engineers who are able to dive into an unfamiliar codebase and solve nasty bags and/or are able to handle interesting problems with distributed systems and parallel processing. I was personally surprised to get an internship offer from CHAI and expected the bar for getting an AI safety role to be much higher. I’d guess that the average person able to get a software engineering job at Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc. (not that I’ve ever received an offer from any of those companies), or perhaps a broader category of people, could do useful direct work, especially if they committed time to gaining relevant skills if necessary. But I might be wrong. (This is all assuming that Anthropic, Redwood, CHAI, etc. are doing useful alignment work.)