Where to begin in ML/AI?

post by Jake the Student (jake-baldwin) · 2023-04-06T20:45:51.312Z · LW · GW · 1 comment

This is a question post.

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    6 aogara
    2 the gears to ascension
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I am a senior CS/Math student at UMD, college park, and I "specialized" my major in machine learning. I have taken courses on Deep Learning and NLP, reinforcement learning, however I still feel like a novice in all of these categories, my proudest achievement being this half-ripped off sudoku CNN I trained that only achieved like 90% accuracy. 

All that being said I want to contribute to the ever progressing world of AI and ML, and I want to know where I should even begin. I would be entirely fine being sent on a super random and likely incorrect path, just to rule out that a method does not work. 

I have deliberated beginning my own projects trying to create Transformer networks or RL implementations, but it all feels a little daunting and arguably useless. Who am I to be able to work alone and come up with something truly useful in heavily researched fields.

What should I work on. Where can someone like myself, who is not currently pursuing further education or research get involved and help the ML/AI society?

P.S. shoutout Lex Fridman and Eliezer Yudkowsky, without their recent podcast together I do not think I would have found this platform.

Answers

answer by aogara · 2023-04-06T21:22:32.207Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Very glad you're interested! Here are some good places to start:

  1. Learn more about the alignment problem with the readings here: https://www.agisafetyfundamentals.com/ai-alignment-curriculum
  2. Learn more about technical agendas relevant to safety here: https://course.mlsafety.org
  3. High level guide on working in the field: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7WXPkpqKGKewAymJf/how-to-pursue-a-career-in-technical-ai-alignment [EA · GW] 
  4. Guide to developing research engineering skills: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/S7dhJR5TDwPb5jypG/levelling-up-in-ai-safety-research-engineering [EA · GW]
  5. More challenging projects in research engineering: https://github.com/jacobhilton/deep_learning_curriculum 
answer by the gears to ascension · 2023-04-06T21:34:47.410Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

[removed due to being too badly misleading, will hopefully come back and replace eventually]

↑ comment by Jake the Student (jake-baldwin) · 2023-04-09T03:10:12.660Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thank you so much for the information!

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comment by Templarrr (templarrr) · 2023-04-07T10:46:37.658Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This place is a good choice to ask if you want to work on a very specific subset of AI Safety/Alignment problems. If you want to work on AI Capabilities I don't think this is the place to ask - consensus among the people here is "the best way right now to work on AI Capabilities is to don't".