About the AI Safety Institute
The AI Safety Institute (AISI), launched at the 2023 Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit, is the world's first state-backed organization dedicated to advancing AI safety for the public interest. Our mission is to assess and mitigate risks from frontier AI systems, including cyber attacks on critical infrastructure, AI-enhanced chemical and biological threats, large-scale societal disruptions, and potential loss of control over increasingly powerful AI. In just one year, we've assembled one of the largest and most respected model evaluation teams, featuring renowned scientists and senior researchers from leading AI labs such as Anthropic, DeepMind, and OpenAI.
At AISI, we're building the premier institution for impacting both technical AI safety and AI governance. We conduct cutting-edge research, develop novel evaluation tools, and provide crucial insights to governments, companies, and international partners. By joining us, you'll collaborate with the brightest minds in the field, directly shape global AI policies, and tackle complex challenges at the forefront of technology and ethics. Whether you're a researcher, engineer, or policy expert, at AISI, you're not just advancing your career – you're positioned to have significant impact in the age of artificial intelligence.
Mechanistic Interpretability
AISI is launching a brand-new Mechanistic Interpretability team to research the fundamental question of how can we tell if a model is scheming? This is an ambitious bet to bring interpretability as a field into prime time. We believe that this is a vital challenge that mechanistic interpretability can help solve, ensuring that dangerous capability evaluations can be reliably determine if models are safe to release even when the models themselves are capable of gaming the evals. We also think it can lead to an entirely new field of alignment evaluations and make substantial contributions to the problem of technical AI safety.
To launch this project we're looking for a team lead, research scientists and research engineers. Apply now to join the largest technical AI safety lab on the planet - help us make this happen!
Role Summary
This team will have a large amount of scientific autonomy, with the ability to chase ambitious research bets. As an example of the kind of work you could be doing however, your responsibilities may involve any of the following:
- Supervised fine tuning (SFT) of large models for scheming.
- Training sparse auto encoders (or fine-tuning open source SAEs).
- Circuit discovery/analysis.
- Automated scheming detection.
You’ll receive coaching from your manager and mentorship from the research directors at AISI (including Geoffrey Irving and Yarin Gal). You will also regularly interact with world-famous researchers and other incredible staff (including alumni from Anthropic, DeepMind, OpenAI and ML professors from Oxford and Cambridge). We have a very strong learning & development culture to support this, including Friday afternoons devoted to deep reading and multiple weekly paper reading groups. From a compute perspective, you'll have unparalleled access to resources including 5,448 Nvidia Grace-Hopper GPUs (e.g., H100s).
Person Specification
You may be a good fit if you have some of the following skills, experience and attitudes:
- Hands-on mechanistic interpretability research experience.
- Experience working within a research team that has delivered multiple exceptional scientific breakthroughs, in deep learning (or a related field). We’re looking for evidence of an exceptional ability to drive progress.
- Comprehensive understanding of large language models (e.g. GPT-4). This includes both a broad understanding of the literature, as well as hands-on experience with things like pre-training or fine tuning LLMs.
- Strong track-record of academic excellence (e.g. multiple spotlight papers at top-tier conferences).
- Improving scientific standards and rigour, through things like mentorship & feedback.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Experience working with world-class multi-disciplinary teams, including both scientists and engineers (e.g. in a top-3 lab).
- Acting as a bar raiser for interviews.
Salary & Benefits
We are hiring individuals at all ranges of seniority and experience within the research unit, and this advert allows you to apply for any of the roles within this range. We will discuss and calibrate with you as part of the process. The full range of salaries available is as follows:
- L3: £65,000 - £75,000
- L4: £85,000 - £95,000
- L5: £105,000 - £115,000
- L6: £125,000 - £135,000
- L7: £145,000
There are a range of pension options available which can be found through the Civil Service website.
Selection Process
In accordance with the Civil Service Commission rules, the following list contains all selection criteria for the interview process.
Required Experience
We select based on skills and experience regarding the following areas:
- Mechanistic interpretability experience
- Research problem selection
- Research science
- Writing code efficiently
- Python
- Frontier model architecture knowledge
- Frontier model training knowledge
- Model evaluations knowledge
- AI safety research knowledge
- Written communication
- Verbal communication
- Teamwork
- Interpersonal skills
- Tackle challenging problems
- Learn through coaching
Desired Experience
We additionally may factor in experience with any of the areas that our work-streams specialise in:
- Autonomous systems
- Cyber security
- Chemistry or Biology
- Safeguards
- Safety Cases
- Societal Impacts
Additional Information
Internal Fraud Database
The Internal Fraud function of the Fraud, Error, Debt and Grants Function at the Cabinet Office processes details of civil servants who have been dismissed for committing internal fraud, or who would have been dismissed had they not resigned. The Cabinet Office receives the details from participating government organisations of civil servants who have been dismissed, or who would have been dismissed had they not resigned, for internal fraud. In instances such as this, civil servants are then banned for 5 years from further employment in the civil service. The Cabinet Office then processes this data and discloses a limited dataset back to DLUHC as a participating government organisations. DLUHC then carry out the pre employment checks so as to detect instances where known fraudsters are attempting to reapply for roles in the civil service. In this way, the policy is ensured and the repetition of internal fraud is prevented. For more information please see - Internal Fraud Register.
Security
Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check and get baseline personnel security standard (BPSS) clearance before they can be appointed. Additionally, there is a strong preference for eligibility for counter-terrorist check (CTC) clearance. Some roles may require higher levels of clearance, and we will state this by exception in the job advertisement. See our vetting charter here.
Nationality requirements
We may be able to offer roles to applicant from any nationality or background. As such we encourage you to apply even if you do not meet the standard nationality requirements (opens in a new window).
