Asking for an acquaintance. If I know some graduate-level machine learning, and have read ~most of the recent mechanistic interpretability literature, and have made good progress understanding a small-ish neural network in the last few months.
Is ARENA for me, or will it teach things I mostly already know?
(I advised this person that they already have ARENA-graduate level, but I want to check in case I’m wrong.)
ARENA might end up teaching this person some mech-interp methods they haven’t seen before, although it sounds like they would be more than capable of self-teaching any mech-interp. The other potential value-add for your acquaintance would be if they wanted to improve their RL or Evals skills, and have a week to conduct a capstone project with advisors. If they were mostly aiming to improve their mech-interp ability by doing ARENA, there would probably be better ways to spend their time.
Asking for an acquaintance. If I know some graduate-level machine learning, and have read ~most of the recent mechanistic interpretability literature, and have made good progress understanding a small-ish neural network in the last few months.
Is ARENA for me, or will it teach things I mostly already know?
(I advised this person that they already have ARENA-graduate level, but I want to check in case I’m wrong.)
ARENA might end up teaching this person some mech-interp methods they haven’t seen before, although it sounds like they would be more than capable of self-teaching any mech-interp. The other potential value-add for your acquaintance would be if they wanted to improve their RL or Evals skills, and have a week to conduct a capstone project with advisors. If they were mostly aiming to improve their mech-interp ability by doing ARENA, there would probably be better ways to spend their time.