- Follow our newsletters and get informed about the upcoming hackathons and other opportunities.
- Read more about AI safety on the Reading What We Can page.
- Go on AI Safety Ideas and find more projects you want to work on
- Join the next hackathon! See them on the front page.
- Check out the currently available opportunities available below (curated by BlueDot Impact). AGI Safety Fundamentals Opportunities.
Steps to becoming an AI safety researcher
Thank you to Julia Persson for compiling this guide
Getting started in technical alignment research might take some time, and it could vary from 6 to 24 months, depending on your background and how much time you dedicate. Here are some examples of things you could spend time on.
- Use AI Safety Training to keep track of opportunities. Apply liberally, but don’t expect to get accepted to the majority of things.
- AI Safety Support Slack #opportunities channel
- Use the AI safety support resources: They have a newsletter, a list of resources and a Slack channel.
- Read Traps for new alignment researchers and this
- Do the AGISF. The curriciulum is open, so you can do it by your own or with a friend. Intro to ML safety is also good.
- In order to learn some practical ML this Course is recommended. Assumes basic familarity with Python programming, Linear algebra and calculus.
- Minitorch is a cool project for learning DL/ML engineering.
Other useful posts:
- Getting started independently in AI safety
- Some advice on independent research
- AI safety starter pack
- Levelling Up in AI Safety Research Engineering
- Advice & resources for junior alignment researchers sequence
Guidelines for your personal career
- Spend a minority of time reading alignment forum / lesswrong that you find interesting. Start building an inside model. WARNING: While this is good to do, its very easy to spend too much time on this. A little bit goes a long way. Spend the majority of your time DOING stuff, not reading.
- If you have some basic ML skills I recommend the monthly Apart Research hackathons to get started doing small projects.
- General skillbuilding is great if you enjoy it. Doing supervised research or internship can be a good use of your time even if its non-alignment related.
- Take care of yourself. Spend as much time on these things as you find fun/interesting/meaningful and can afford and no more :)
