Skilling-up in ML Engineering for Alignment: request for comments

By TheMcDouglas @ 2022-04-24T06:40 (+8)

TLDR: Please fill out this survey if you are a potential or established ML Engineer, to let us know your thoughts and preferences on the best way to gain engineering skills.

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We at Cambridge Effective Altruism CIC are interested in the demand for engineering skills in alignment, and what we can do to help increase the supply. Two ways of increasing supply of engineers in alignment are:

1. Bringing in existing, experienced engineers interested in working on alignment.
2. Helping undergraduates and others interested in alignment to gain engineering skills, and contribute in the future.

We will address recruitment of existing engineers in another post. This post focuses on point 2, skilling-up. We want to discover what, if anything, field builders can do to accelerate the acquisition of engineering skills amongst those interested in the alignment problem. We hope this will prime the field with altruistically motivated, highly skilled people in months or years to come.

We are keen to capture a broad view on people’s thoughts about what would be most helpful for them in gaining better engineering skills, and to understand how much interest there would be for efforts that aid that.

To do that, we’ve created a survey with our key questions. We would love to hear from you if any of the following apply:

• You are interested in ML engineering for alignment, and think you could get a lot of value through some form of structured education (e.g. bootcamps or online courses),
• You have previous experience of some form of structured education related to coding or ML (either as a participant or as an instructor / organiser), and are able to share details of what worked / didn’t work well in this programme,
• You have experience working in ML engineering, and can share details of how you skilled up in this field, or what in your opinion makes a great engineer,
• You are an employer for a role related to ML engineering, and you would be happy to share views on what kinds of skills and/or qualifications you look for in potential hires,
• You would be interested in assisting the development of any programmes that were founded as a result of this work in some way (e.g. as an organiser or mentor).

We look forward to hearing from you!