Proposal: If other people are doing independent research in London I’d be really interested in co-working and doing some regular feedback and updates. (Could be elsewhere but I find being in person important for me personally). If anyone would be interested reply here or message me and we’ll see if we can set something up :)
General comment: This feels accurate to me. I’ve been working as an independent researcher for the last few months, after 9 months of pure skill building and have got close but not succeeded in getting jobs at the local research orgs in London (DeepMind, Conjecture).
It’s a great way to build some skills, having to build your own stack, but it’s also hard to build research skills without people with more experience giving feedback, and because iteration of ideas is slow, it’s difficult to know whether to stick with something or try something else.
In particular it forces you to be super proactive if you want to get any feedback.
I’m not in London, but aisafety.community (the afaik most comprehensive and way too unknown resource on AI safety communities) suggests the London AI Safety Hub. There are some remote alignment communities mentioned on aisafety.community as well. You might want to consider them as fallback options, but probably already know most if not all of them.
Proposal: If other people are doing independent research in London I’d be really interested in co-working and doing some regular feedback and updates. (Could be elsewhere but I find being in person important for me personally). If anyone would be interested reply here or message me and we’ll see if we can set something up :)
General comment: This feels accurate to me. I’ve been working as an independent researcher for the last few months, after 9 months of pure skill building and have got close but not succeeded in getting jobs at the local research orgs in London (DeepMind, Conjecture).
It’s a great way to build some skills, having to build your own stack, but it’s also hard to build research skills without people with more experience giving feedback, and because iteration of ideas is slow, it’s difficult to know whether to stick with something or try something else.
In particular it forces you to be super proactive if you want to get any feedback.
I’m not in London, but aisafety.community (the afaik most comprehensive and way too unknown resource on AI safety communities) suggests the London AI Safety Hub. There are some remote alignment communities mentioned on aisafety.community as well. You might want to consider them as fallback options, but probably already know most if not all of them.
Let me know if that’s at all helpful.
Cheers Severin yeah that’s useful, I’ve not seen aisafety.community (almost certainly my fault, I don’t do enough to find out what’s going on).
That Slack link doesn’t work for me though, it just asks me to sign into one of my existing workspaces..
Flagged the broken link to the team. I found this, which may or may not be the same project: https://www.safeailondon.org/
It’s not the same thing; the link was broken because Slack links expire after a month. Fixed for now.