I am a physicist making the transition to technical AI safety. I was quite an experienced researcher in physics, focusing on machine learning applications in particle physics (LHC). I am relatively well known researcher in the physics-ML community, I landed a pretty coveted tenure-track scientist job earlier this year which I am now giving up. All to say I have a lot of technical ML / empirical research experience but am new to AI safety.
I had casually followed Effective Altruism for about a decade: regular donor to GiveWell, but not engaged in the community. Casually read SSC and similar blogs sometimes, but hadn’t taken AI safety seriously until the last year or so. I have been reading a lot of papers and lesswrong posts over the last few months to get up to speed on AI safety topics. Applying to fellowships like MATS and similar. Right now I feel the most drawn to mech interp and alignment research. I am starting my own research project on trying to test the persona selection model which I will post about soon (if anyone wants to collaborate lmk!)
I am also trying to announce why I am making this transition pretty broadly in the physics community to hopefully inspire others to do the same. I wrote a blog post about it that got a decent amount of traction in the physics community, a lot of colleagues at a similar career stage reached out after and seem to be open to the idea of transition to AI safety and I think are kind of looking to me to show them an example of how it can be done.
Hello!
I am a physicist making the transition to technical AI safety. I was quite an experienced researcher in physics, focusing on machine learning applications in particle physics (LHC). I am relatively well known researcher in the physics-ML community, I landed a pretty coveted tenure-track scientist job earlier this year which I am now giving up. All to say I have a lot of technical ML / empirical research experience but am new to AI safety.
I had casually followed Effective Altruism for about a decade: regular donor to GiveWell, but not engaged in the community. Casually read SSC and similar blogs sometimes, but hadn’t taken AI safety seriously until the last year or so. I have been reading a lot of papers and lesswrong posts over the last few months to get up to speed on AI safety topics. Applying to fellowships like MATS and similar. Right now I feel the most drawn to mech interp and alignment research. I am starting my own research project on trying to test the persona selection model which I will post about soon (if anyone wants to collaborate lmk!)
I am also trying to announce why I am making this transition pretty broadly in the physics community to hopefully inspire others to do the same. I wrote a blog post about it that got a decent amount of traction in the physics community, a lot of colleagues at a similar career stage reached out after and seem to be open to the idea of transition to AI safety and I think are kind of looking to me to show them an example of how it can be done.