Research Scientist

FAR.AI is seeking applications from both experienced and first-time Research Scientists to develop and execute on a safety research agenda and/or accelerate our existing projects.

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.

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 Bay Area 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

We are seeking applications from potential Research Scientists who can:

• Take ownership of and accelerate existing AI Alignment research agendas.
• Develop their own exciting AI Alignment research agendas.
• Lead novel research projects where there may be unclear markers of progress and/or success.
• Contribute to the development of best practices for AI safety research at FAR.AI and in the broader community.
• Publish research findings and engage with the AI safety community.

About You

We are excited by unconventional backgrounds.

You may have the following:

• New and under-explored AI Alignment idea(s).
• Experience leading and/or playing a senior role in research projects related to machine learning.
• Ability to effectively communicate novel methods and solutions to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• PhD or several years research experience in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning or statistics.

About the Projects

As Research Scientist you would lead AI safety research projects or make essential contributions to existing projects. Examples of ongoing projects at FAR include:

• 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.

Logistics

You could be an employee or an independent Contractor for FAR AI, a 501(c)(3) research non-profit.

• Location: Both remote and in-person (Berkeley, CA) are possible. We sponsor visas for in-person employees, and can also hire remotely in most countries.
• Hours: Full-time (40 hours/week).
• Compensation: $100,000-$175,000/year depending on experience and location. We will also pay for work-related travel and equipment expenses. We offer catered lunch and dinner at our offices in Berkeley.
• Application process: A 90-minute programming assessment, 2 1-hour interviews, and a 1-2 week paid work trial. If you are not available for a work trial we may be able to find alternative ways of testing your fit.

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