I am a senior CS/Math student at UMD, college park, and I “specialized” my major in machine learning. I have taken courses on Deep Learning and NLP, reinforcement learning, however I still feel like a novice in all of these categories, my proudest achievement being this half-ripped off sudoku CNN I trained that only achieved like 90% accuracy.
All that being said I want to contribute to the ever progressing world of AI and ML, and I want to know where I should even begin. I would be entirely fine being sent on a super random and likely incorrect path, just to rule out that a method does not work.
I have deliberated beginning my own projects trying to create Transformer networks or RL implementations, but it all feels a little daunting and arguably useless. Who am I to be able to work alone and come up with something truly useful in heavily researched fields.
What should I work on. Where can someone like myself, who is not currently pursuing further education or research get involved and help the ML/AI society?
P.S. shoutout Lex Fridman and Eliezer Yudkowsky, without their recent podcast together I do not think I would have found this platform.
Very glad you’re interested! Here are some good places to start:
Learn more about the alignment problem with the readings here: https://www.agisafetyfundamentals.com/ai-alignment-curriculum
Learn more about technical agendas relevant to safety here: https://course.mlsafety.org
High level guide on working in the field: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7WXPkpqKGKewAymJf/how-to-pursue-a-career-in-technical-ai-alignment
Guide to developing research engineering skills: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/S7dhJR5TDwPb5jypG/levelling-up-in-ai-safety-research-engineering
More challenging projects in research engineering: https://github.com/jacobhilton/deep_learning_curriculum
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Thank you so much for the information!