80,000 Hours Podcast With Rob Wiblin

Want to help steer the 21st century’s most transformative technology? First complete an undergrad degree in computer science and mathematics. Prioritize harder courses over easier ones. Publish at least one paper before you apply for a PhD. Find a supervisor who’ll have a lot of time for you. Go to the top conferences and meet your future colleagues. And finally, get yourself hired. That’s Dr Jan Leike’s advice on how to join him as a Research Scientist at DeepMind, the world’s leading AI team. Jan is also a Research Associate at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, and his research aims to make machine learning robustly beneficial. His current focus is getting AI systems to learn good ‘objective functions’ in cases where we can’t easily specify the outcome we actually want. Full transcript, summary and links to learn more. How might you know you’re a good fit for research? Jan says to check whether you get obsessed with puzzles and problems, and find yourself mulling over quest