Thanks for the informative post as usual.
Full-disclosure: I’m a researcher at UC Berkeley financially supported by CHAI, one of the organisations reviewed in this post. However, this comment is just my personal opinion.
Re: location, I certainly agree that an organization does not need to be in the Bay Area to do great work, but I do think location is important. In particular, there’s a significant advantage to working in or near a major AI hub. The Bay Area is one such place (Berkeley, Stanford, Google Brain, OpenAI, FAIR) but not the only one; e.g. London (DeepMind, UCL) and Montreal (MILA, Brain, et al) are also very strong.
I also want to push back a bit on the assumption that people working for AI alignment organisations will be involved with EA and rationalist communities. While it may be true in many cases, at CHAI I think it’s only around 50% of staff. So whether these communities are thriving or not in a particular area doesn’t seem that relevant to me for organisational location decisions.
Description of CHAI is pretty accurate. I think it’s a particularly good opportunity for people who are considering grad school as a long-term option: we’re in an excellent position to help people get into top programs, and you’ll also get a sense of what academic research culture is like.
We’d like to hire more than one engineer, and are currently trialling several hires. We have a mixture of work, some of which is more ML oriented and some of which is more infrastructure oriented. So we’d be willing to consider applicants with limited ML experience, but they’d need to have strengths in other areas to compensate.
If anyone is considering any of these roles and is uncertain whether they’re a good fit, I’d encourage you to just apply. It doesn’t take much time for you to apply or for the organisation to do an initial screening. I’ve spoken to several people who didn’t think they were viable candidates for a particular role, and then turned out to be one of the best applicants we’d received.