Remotefull-timeDirector
Verified 13h agoPosted 11 days ago
Job description
FAR.AI is seeking applications for a Head of Engineering to lead and scale our engineering team, driving the technical execution of our frontier AI safety research projects.
About UsFAR.AI is a non-profit AI research institute focused on ensuring the safe development and deployment of frontier AI technologies.Since starting in July 2022, FAR has grown to 17 FTE, produced 27 academic papers, and established the leading AI safety events for research and international cooperation. Our work is recognized globally, with publications at leading venues such as NeurIPS, ICML and ICLR that have been featured in the Financial Times, Nature News and MIT Tech Review. We leverage our research insights to drive practical change through red-teaming with frontier model developers. Additionally, we help steer and grow the AI safety field through developing research roadmaps with renowned researchers such as Yoshua Bengio; running an AI safety focused co-working space FAR.Labs with 40 members; and through targeted grants to technical researchers.
About FAR.ResearchOur research team likes to move fast. We explore promising research directions in AI safety and scale up only those showing a high potential for impact. Unlike other AI safety labs that take a bet on a single research direction, FAR aims to pursue a diverse portfolio of projects.Our current focus areas include:* building a science of robustness (e.g. finding vulnerabilities in superhuman Go AIs)* finding more effective approaches to value alignment (e.g. training from language feedback)* advancing model evaluation techniques (e.g. inverse scaling and codebook features, and learned planning).
We also put our research into practice through red-teaming engagements with frontier AI developers, and collaborations with government institutes.
Other FAR ProjectsTo build a flourishing field of AI safety research, we host targeted workshops and events, operate an AI safety co-working space in Berkeley called FAR.Labs, and provide grants to academics working on priority research areas. Our previous events include the International Dialogue for AI Safety that brought together prominent scientists (including 2 Turing Award winners) from around the globe, culminating in a public statement calling for global action on AI safety research and governance. We also host the semiannual Alignment Workshop with 150 researchers from academia, industry and government to learn about the latest developments in AI safety and find collaborators. For more information on FAR.AI’s activities, please visit our latest summary post.
About the RoleAs (the first) Head of Engineering at FAR, you will play a crucial role to build and oversee a team of Research Engineers, who are working to ensure the safe and responsible development of advanced artificial intelligence systems.
About the projects* As Head of Engineering you would lead collaborations and contribute to many projects, with examples below:* Scaling laws for prompt injections. Will advances in capabilities from increasing model and data scale help resolve prompt injections or “jailbreaks” in language models, or is progress in average-case performance orthogonal to worst-case robustness?* Robustness of advanced AI systems. Explore adversarial training, architectural improvements and other changes to deep learning systems to improve their robustness. We are exploring this both in zero-sum board games and language models.* Mechanistic interpretability for mesa-optimization. Develop techniques to identify internal planning in models to effectively audit the “goals” of models in addition to their external behavior.* Redteaming of frontier models. Apply our research insights to test for vulnerabilities and limitations of frontier AI models prior to deployment.
About UsFAR.AI is a non-profit AI research institute focused on ensuring the safe development and deployment of frontier AI technologies.Since starting in July 2022, FAR has grown to 17 FTE, produced 27 academic papers, and established the leading AI safety events for research and international cooperation. Our work is recognized globally, with publications at leading venues such as NeurIPS, ICML and ICLR that have been featured in the Financial Times, Nature News and MIT Tech Review. We leverage our research insights to drive practical change through red-teaming with frontier model developers. Additionally, we help steer and grow the AI safety field through developing research roadmaps with renowned researchers such as Yoshua Bengio; running an AI safety focused co-working space FAR.Labs with 40 members; and through targeted grants to technical researchers.
About FAR.ResearchOur research team likes to move fast. We explore promising research directions in AI safety and scale up only those showing a high potential for impact. Unlike other AI safety labs that take a bet on a single research direction, FAR aims to pursue a diverse portfolio of projects.Our current focus areas include:* building a science of robustness (e.g. finding vulnerabilities in superhuman Go AIs)* finding more effective approaches to value alignment (e.g. training from language feedback)* advancing model evaluation techniques (e.g. inverse scaling and codebook features, and learned planning).
We also put our research into practice through red-teaming engagements with frontier AI developers, and collaborations with government institutes.
Other FAR ProjectsTo build a flourishing field of AI safety research, we host targeted workshops and events, operate an AI safety co-working space in Berkeley called FAR.Labs, and provide grants to academics working on priority research areas. Our previous events include the International Dialogue for AI Safety that brought together prominent scientists (including 2 Turing Award winners) from around the globe, culminating in a public statement calling for global action on AI safety research and governance. We also host the semiannual Alignment Workshop with 150 researchers from academia, industry and government to learn about the latest developments in AI safety and find collaborators. For more information on FAR.AI’s activities, please visit our latest summary post.
About the RoleAs (the first) Head of Engineering at FAR, you will play a crucial role to build and oversee a team of Research Engineers, who are working to ensure the safe and responsible development of advanced artificial intelligence systems.
About the projects* As Head of Engineering you would lead collaborations and contribute to many projects, with examples below:* Scaling laws for prompt injections. Will advances in capabilities from increasing model and data scale help resolve prompt injections or “jailbreaks” in language models, or is progress in average-case performance orthogonal to worst-case robustness?* Robustness of advanced AI systems. Explore adversarial training, architectural improvements and other changes to deep learning systems to improve their robustness. We are exploring this both in zero-sum board games and language models.* Mechanistic interpretability for mesa-optimization. Develop techniques to identify internal planning in models to effectively audit the “goals” of models in addition to their external behavior.* Redteaming of frontier models. Apply our research insights to test for vulnerabilities and limitations of frontier AI models prior to deployment.