How do I start a programming career in the West?

2 years ago I had no credentials, not even an undergrad degree. Got spooked by GPT-3 and laser-focused on it, but without preconceptions about where I'd end up. Played with GPT-3 on AI Dungeon, then built an interface to interact with higher bandwidth. This made me (Pareto) best in the world [LW · GW] at a something in less than 6 months, because the opportunity to upskill did not exist 6 months ago. Published some papers and blog posts that were easy to churn out because they were just samples of some of the many many thoughts about GPT that now filled my mind. Joined EleutherAI and started contributing, mostly conceptually, because I didn't have deep ML experience. Responded to an ad by Latitude (the company that makes AI Dungeon) for the position of "GPT-3 hacker". Worked there for a few months as an ML engineer, then was one of the founding employees of Conjecture (I got to know the founders through EleutherAI). Now I am Involved.

The field of AI is moving so quickly that it's easy to become Pareto best in the world if you depart from the mainline of what everyone else is doing. Apparently you are smart and creative; if you're also truly "passionate" about AI, maybe you have the curiosity and drive to spot the unexploited opportunities and niches. The efficient market is a myth, except inside the Overton window; I would recommend not to try to compete there. So the strategy I'm advocating is most similar to your option (2). But I'd suggest following your curiosity and tinkering to improve your map of where the truly fertile opportunities lie, instead of doing a side project for the sake of having a side project -- the latter is the road to mediocrity.

Also, find out where the interesting people who are defining the cutting edge are hanging out and learn from them. You might be surprised that you soon have a lot to teach them as well, if you've been exploring the very high dimensional frontier independently.

I cannot promise this is the best advice for you, but it is the advice I would give someone similar to myself.

As someone who gives data science interviews, my (personal, unreliable) opinion is that you should start preparing for interviews as soon as possible, and actually begin interviewing as soon as you feel ready.

I'm not saying you'll get in on the first try! You might, in which case you'll save a lot of effort doing anything else. If not, you'll get some sense of what the interview process is like, and where your strengths and weaknesses are.

If you can't get interviews at all, you may need to think about improving your resume. That could look like options 1, or 2, or 4 if you can swing it; the details probably depend a lot on your personal circumstances.

If you can get interviews, but not jobs, you should probably work on your interview technique. For early-career hires, we care more about how the interview and practical exercise go than anything else. (Remember to ask the interviewers for feedback at the end, e.g. "is there anything you think I could improve on?")

If you want to go get some super-impressive experience, that's not a bad thing, it's certainly going to make us more interested; that said, it's a large amount of work to do so convincingly, and it won't save you if you can't impress on the more routine parts of the interview.

Also, don't feel you have to sell your existing experience short: "I did some clever feature engineering that resulted in a better model for our data" is actually a pretty good answer. I can't speak for AI safety, but there are lots of other opportunities that would be happy to have someone who knows their way around a dataset.

If you're not sure how to explain it, then practise that! You're going to be evaluated on your communication as much as anything else, and explaining technical concepts to people who don't understand them is often part of the job. They won't need to know it inside-out, just give them a sense of what's going on, and why your efforts mattered.

There was a similar question [LW · GW] a few months back; you may find the answers there helpful.

As someone who's running Conjecture's hiring round, I would encourage you to apply anyway! We don't care massively about credentials and weight interesting projects that are open source much more highly. Like Janus said, really building out projects that you're highly interested in is v useful both for you and for future employers.

Are you a Chinese citizen? If so, getting a programming job in the West without a degree in CS or related fields might be hard, visa-wise. The default way through is a Master's degree, but there are probably ways to hack this (e.g. get a job in a multinational with offices in China, transfer to the US).