About The Job
The AI Safety Institute is the first state-backed organisation focused on advanced AI safety for the public interest. We launched at the AI Safety Summit because we believe taking responsible action on this extraordinary technology requires a capable and empowered group of technical experts within government. Our staff includes senior alumni from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, start-ups and the UK government, and ML professors from Oxford and Cambridge. We are now calling on the world’s top technical talent to build the institute from the ground up. This is a truly unique opportunity to help shape AI safety at an international level. We have ambitious goals and need to move fast.
- Develop and conduct evaluations on advanced AI systems: We will characterise safety-relevant capabilities, understand the safety and security of systems, and assess their societal impacts.
- Drive foundational AI safety research: We will launch moonshot research projects and convene world-class external researchers.
- Facilitate information exchange: We will establish clear information-sharing channels between the Institute and other national and international actors. These include stakeholders such as policymakers and international partners.
About the Role
The candidate will have a background in empirical or computational social science, and a demonstrable track record of conducting research that studies how digital technology impacts our society, economy, or democracy. The appointed candidate will have strong academic credentials, including graduate-level training (in most cases a PhD). They will have experience of lab-based experimentation, running RCTs, analysing natural experiments, or conducting computational analyses of big data (or ideally, all of the above). They will be comfortable with hands-on use of advanced statistical methods and data analytic tools, but also demonstrate an understanding of the most pressing questions that arise when measuring the impact of AI on society. They will have a familiarity with the fast-moving literature on AI development and how it applies to the social sciences.
Person Specification
The ideal candidate will have excellent research skills.
Example duties on any given day could include:
- Applying data science methods to analyze large-scale usage data from an LLM
- Designing a survey to gain information about model usage in a given setting
- Identifying and liaising with third parties / providers who may facilitate data access
- Dealing with ethical or data protection issues that arise from a study
- Constructing advanced statistical models that quantify trends in a dataset
- Preparing a paper for internal or external publication
- Coordinating with other team members to build infrastructure for data collection or analysis
The ideal candidate will have skills and experience that allow them to:
- Design pipelines to conduct rigorous and impactful research in the social sciences
- Analyse and interpret data in ways that meaningfully contribute to research at AISI
- Understand the capabilities and potential impact of advanced AI models, including LLMs
- Conduct advanced statistical analysis using R, Python or an equivalent tool
- Keep track of and respond to the fast-moving literature, ensuring that our research is additional to that being conducted elsewhere
- Coordinate closely with research and engineering partners in your team to design new methods and build the instruments that enable high-quality data collection at scale, with a focus on AI alignment
- Clearly communicate insights from studies to influence research decisions across stakeholders.
Essential requirements for the role this include:
- Significant experience with leading work in empirical or computational social science, including large-scale data collection and/or analysis
- A track record of conducting and disseminating rigorous and impactful research
- Experience with data science methods and strong coding skills in a relevant language
- Expertise in advanced statistical methods
- An understanding of the ethical and data protection issues associated with data collection (e.g. Research Ethics, GDPR)
- Strong project management skills and demonstrable experience of teamwork, including building rapport with people from diverse backgrounds
Core Requirements
- You should be able to spend at least 4 days per week on working with us
- You should be able to join us for at least 12 months
- You should be able work from our office in London (Whitehall) for parts of the week, but we provide flexibility for remote work