Research Scientist, Interpretability Job at Anthropic, San Francisco, CA

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  • Anthropic
  • San Francisco, CA

Job Description

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems. About the role: When you see what modern language models are capable of, do you wonder, "How do these things work? How can we trust them?" The Interpretability team at Anthropic is working to reverse-engineer how trained models work because we believe that a mechanistic understanding is the most robust way to make advanced systems safe. We’re looking for researchers and engineers to join our efforts. People mean many different things by "interpretability". We're focused on mechanistic interpretability , which aims to discover how neural network parameters map to meaningful algorithms. Some useful analogies might be to think of us as trying to do "biology" or "neuroscience" of neural networks, or as treating neural networks as binary computer programs we're trying to "reverse engineer". We aim to create a solid foundation for mechanistically understanding neural networks and making them safe (see our vision post ). In the short term, we have focused on resolving the issue of "superposition" (see Toy Models of Superposition , Superposition, Memorization, and Double Descent , and our May 2023 update ), which causes the computational units of the models, like neurons and attention heads, to be individually uninterpretable, and on finding ways to decompose models into more interpretable components. Our recent work finding millions of features on Sonnet, one of our production language models, represents progress in this direction. This is a stepping stone towards our overall goal of mechanistically understanding neural networks. We often collaborate with teams across Anthropic, such as Alignment Science and Societal Impacts to use our work to make Anthropic’s models safer. We also have an A few places to learn more about our work and team at a high level are this introduction to Interpretability from our research lead, Chris Olah ; a discussion of our work on the Hard Fork podcast produced by the New York Times, and this blog post (and accompanying video) sharing more about some of the engineering challenges we’d had to solve to get these results.Some of our team's notable publications include A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits , In-context Learning and Induction Heads , and Toy Models of Superposition . This work builds on ideas from members' work prior to Anthropic such as the original circuits thread , Multimodal Neurons , Activation Atlases , and Building Blocks . We aim to create a solid foundation for mechanistically understanding neural networks and making them safe (see our vision post ). In the short term, we have focused on resolving the issue of "superposition" (see Toy Models of Superposition , Superposition, Memorization, and Double Descent , and our May 2023 update ), which causes the computational units of the models, like neurons and attention heads, to be individually uninterpretable, and on finding ways to decompose models into more interpretable components. Our recent work finding millions of features on Sonnet, one of our production language models, represents progress in this direction. This is a stepping stone towards our overall goal of mechanistically understanding neural networks. We often collaborate with teams across Anthropic, such as Alignment Science and Societal Impacts to use our work to make Anthropic’s models safer. We also have an Interpretability Architectures project that involves collaborating with Pretraining. If you would be especially excited to work on a project that touches upon the intersection of Interpretability and another team, feel free to note down the specific team(s) you’d be interested in collaborating with. Responsibilities: Develop methods for understanding LLMs by reverse engineering algorithms learned in their weights Design and run robust experiments, both quickly in toy scenarios and at scale in large models Build infrastructure for running experiments and visualizing results Work with colleagues to communicate results internally and publicly You may be a good fit if you: Have a strong track record of scientific research (in any field), and have done some work on Interpretability Enjoy team science – working collaboratively to make big discoveries Are comfortable with messy experimental science. We're inventing the field as we work, and the first textbook is years away You view research and engineering as two sides of the same coin. Every team member writes code, designs and runs experiments, and interprets results You can clearly articulate and discuss the motivations behind your work, and teach us about what you've learned. You like writing up and communicating your results, even when they're null Familiarity with Python is required for this role. Role Specific Location Policy: This role is based in San Francisco office; however, we are open to considering exceptional candidates for remote work on a case-by-case basis. The expected salary range for this position is:

$315,000 - $560,000 USD

Logistics Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience. Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices. Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this. We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team. How we're different We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills. The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences. Come work with us! Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Apply for this job * indicates a required field First Name * Last Name * Email * Phone Resume/CV * Enter manually Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf (Optional) Personal Preferences How do you pronounce your name? Website Publications (e.g. Google Scholar) URL * Please link to your publications/research outputs, e.g. Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar (if you don't have any, please apply to our Research Engineer posting instead) Are you open to working in-person in one of our offices 25% of the time? * Select... When is the earliest you would want to start working with us? Do you have any deadlines or timeline considerations we should be aware of? AI Policy for Application * Select... While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree. Why Anthropic? * Why do you want to work at Anthropic? (We value this response highly - great answers are often 200-400 words.) Why do you want to work on the Anthropic interpretability team? (We value this response highly - great answers are often 200-400 words. We like to see deeper and more specific engagement with Anthropic and our interpretability agenda than simply interest in AI or LLMs.) * Please briefly describe the technical achievement you’re most proud of, including what you did, how you collaborated with others (if relevant), and its significance or impact. * Please share a link to the piece of work you've done that is most relevant to the interpretability team, along with a brief description of the work and its relevance. * What’s your ideal breakdown of your time in a working week, in terms of hours or % per week spent on research discussions and meetings, coding and code review, reading papers, etc.? * Will you now or will you in the future require employment visa sponsorship to work in the country in which the job you're applying for is located? * Select... Additional Information * Add a cover letter or anything else you want to share. LinkedIn Profile Please ensure to provide either your LinkedIn profile or Resume, we require at least one of the two. Are you open to relocation for this role? * Select... What is the address from which you plan on working? If you would need to relocate, please type "relocating". Have you ever interviewed at Anthropic before? * Select... Do you require visa sponsorship? * Select... Voluntary Self-Identification For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey.Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in aconfidential file. As set forth in Anthropic’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law. If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows: A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability. A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service. An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense. An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985. Select... 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If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at . How do you know if you have a disability? A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your “major life activities.” If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to: Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally) Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS Blind or low vision Cancer (past or present) Cardiovascular or heart disease Celiac disease Cerebral palsy Deaf or serious difficulty hearing Diabetes Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders Epilepsy or other seizure disorder Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome Intellectual or developmental disability Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD Missing limbs or partially missing limbs Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS) Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities Partial or complete paralysis (any cause) Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema Short stature (dwarfism) Traumatic brain injury Disability Status Select... 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Contract work, Temporary work, For contractors, For subcontractor, Remote job, Relocation, Visa sponsorship, Work visa, Flexible hours,

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