I’m pretty skeptical that Neel’s MATS stream is partially supported/subsidized by GDM’s desire to generally hire for capabilities . (And I certainly don’t think they directly fund this.) Same for other mech interp hiring at GDM, I doubt that anyone is thinking “these mech interp employees might convert into employees for capabilities”. That said, this sort of thinking might subsidize the overall alignment/safety team at GDM to some extent, but I think this would mostly be a mistake for the company.
Seems plausible that this is an explicit motivation for junior/internship hiring on the Anthropic interp team. (I don’t think the Anthropic interp team has a MATS stream.)
I think Neel seems to have a somewhat unique amount of freedom, so I have less of a strong take there, but I am confident that GDM would be substantially less excited about its employees taking time off to mentor a bunch of people if the kind of work they were doing would produce artifacts that were substantially less well-respected by the ML crowd, or did not look like they are demonstrating the kind of skills that are indicative of good ML engineering capability.
(I think random (non-leadership) GDM employees generally have a lot of freedom while employees of other companies have much less in-practice freedom (except for maybe longer time OpenAI employees who I think have a lot of freedom).)
(My sense is this changed a lot after the Deepmind/GBrain merger and ChatGPT, and the modern GDM seems to give people a lot less slack in the same way, though you are probably still directionally correct)
I’m pretty skeptical that Neel’s MATS stream is partially supported/subsidized by GDM’s desire to generally hire for capabilities . (And I certainly don’t think they directly fund this.) Same for other mech interp hiring at GDM, I doubt that anyone is thinking “these mech interp employees might convert into employees for capabilities”. That said, this sort of thinking might subsidize the overall alignment/safety team at GDM to some extent, but I think this would mostly be a mistake for the company.
Seems plausible that this is an explicit motivation for junior/internship hiring on the Anthropic interp team. (I don’t think the Anthropic interp team has a MATS stream.)
I think Neel seems to have a somewhat unique amount of freedom, so I have less of a strong take there, but I am confident that GDM would be substantially less excited about its employees taking time off to mentor a bunch of people if the kind of work they were doing would produce artifacts that were substantially less well-respected by the ML crowd, or did not look like they are demonstrating the kind of skills that are indicative of good ML engineering capability.
(I think random (non-leadership) GDM employees generally have a lot of freedom while employees of other companies have much less in-practice freedom (except for maybe longer time OpenAI employees who I think have a lot of freedom).)
(My sense is this changed a lot after the Deepmind/GBrain merger and ChatGPT, and the modern GDM seems to give people a lot less slack in the same way, though you are probably still directionally correct)
(Huh, good to know this changed. I wasn’t aware of this.)