Technical Communications Specialist (Expression of Interest)

FAR AI is seeking applications from science communicators with a range of skills from technical writing, graphic design, presentation development and web/social media management. You will help effectively communicate our research findings to the scientific community and other key stakeholders.

• Expression of Interest

About Us

FAR AI is a technical AI research non-profit, focused on ensuring the safe development and deployment of frontier AI technologies.

Since starting in July 2022, FAR has grown to 12 FTE, produced 13 academic papers, hosted events for some of the world’s leading AI & computer science researchers, and opened our AI safety focused co-working space which is home to around 40 members.

We believe that the communication of results is critical to the success of research. Research has shown that language editing improves perceived research quality and even that tweeted papers are better cited. We have various research projects currently bottlenecked by the communication of results, and are hiring science communicators to work closely with our research teams to disseminate their findings.

“At least 50% of the time [on a research project] must go for the presentation. It’s a big, big number.” - Richard Hamming, You and Your Research

About FAR Research

Our 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. We also put our research into practice through red-teaming engagements with frontier AI developers.

Our current focus areas are 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), and model evaluation (e.g. inverse scaling and codebook features).

Other FAR Projects

To build a flourishing field of AI safety research, we host targeted workshops and events, and operate a co-working space in Berkeley, called FAR Labs. 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 recently hosted the New Orleans Alignment Workshop for over 140 researchers from academia and industry to learn about AI safety and find collaborators. For more information on FAR AI’s activities, please visit our latest post.

About the Role

You will work closely with our research teams to communicate their results to the research community and other key stakeholders. You will work on a variety of projects led by different researchers. Your contributions will be recognized with either co-authorship or acknowledgements as appropriate, enabling you to develop a portfolio.

Our current projects need to be communicated in various different ways, which require the skills outlined below. We expect even strong candidates will have experience in only a subset of these areas, and are open to hiring multiple people with different skill sets. So if you think you might be a good fit for some of these areas, please express interest!

Technical writing:

• Writing or editing drafts of academic papers geared towards a scholarly audience (example).
• Writing blog post summaries of papers, targeted at a technically knowledgeable (but not necessarily expert) audience (example).
• Drafting blog posts from notes of conversations or debates (example).
• Develop engaging presentations for a scholarly community. For example, a workshop introduction or conference talk.

Graphic design:

• Creating illustrations to effectively communicate complex concepts in papers, blog posts or presentations. For example, see the illustrations in the Eliciting Latent Knowledge agenda, or Figure 1 in the Inverse Reward Design paper.
• Creating logos for research projects or software (example logo and its associated codebase).

Websites & social media:

• Creating and maintaining websites, to showcase a research project or lab.
• Helping manage the social media presence of prominent researchers or labs.

About You

You might be a good fit if you are:

• Familiar with some of the main themes of technical AI safety research.
• Enthusiastic about communicating complex ideas as simply as possible.
• Are results-oriented and motivated by impactful research.
• Proactive and can independently prioritise your tasks.

It is preferable that you have:

• Prior study or work experience in computer science or other quantitative discipline.
• You could write a blog post summarizing an academic paper like this one.
• Technical writing:
  • Experience with communicating to scholarly audiences.
  • Basic familiarity with LaTeX.
• Graphic design:
  • Experience creating scientific illustrations and/or other vector graphics.

Logistics

• Location: Both remote and in-person (Berkeley, CA) are possible. We sponsor visas for full-time in-person employees, and can also hire remotely in most countries.
• Hours: both part-time and full-time roles are available depending on your interests and skills.
• Compensation: $60,000-$120,000/year depending on experience and location. We offer catered lunch and dinner at our offices in Berkeley.
• Application process: Applications will be evaluated on a rolling basis. The application process consists of a paid work test (8 hours) in which you will write a short blog post summarising a technical AI safety paper, a short non-technical interview, and a paid work trial (40 hours). If you are not available for a work trial we may be able to find alternative ways of testing your fit.

Please express interest in this role! If you have any questions about the role, please do get in touch at talent@far.ai.