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Pedro Ávila: Switching Careers Into AI Alignment
In this episode, James is joined by AE Studio Research Manager Pedro Ávila to discuss transitioning into a career in AI alignment, after Pedro left a 12-year career at Google to work on the problem full time. It’s a practical conversation about how someone from industry, without a PhD or a research CV, actually makes the jump.
Pedro traces his route from privacy engineer at Google, through the company’s early Responsible AI effort, to the realization that very few people worldwide work on alignment. A one-on-one consultation with 80,000 Hours led to an introduction to AE Studio; Blue Dot Impact courses, a stack of alignment reading, and more than 400 job applications later, he landed as a research manager at AE Studio. Along the way, he explains why AE’s business model: a consultancy whose revenue funds the research lab: is what convinced him this was the place.
James and Pedro make the case that alignment research is bottlenecked on more than researchers: capable operators, program managers, and especially ML engineers massively accelerate the people driving the research agenda. Demonstrating that a technique scales to billions of parameters means orchestrating dozens or hundreds of GPUs: hard engineering work that academic training doesn’t cover. That’s why AE indexes on engineering experience, and why “I don’t have the technical chops” is usually the wrong reason to stay put.
They also discuss AE’s new fellows program with the AI Alignment Foundation: hackathons in several cities aimed at helping industry engineers make the same transition: plus what changes when you move from a 150,000-person company to a 150-person one: week-to-week experiments, failing fast, and using whatever tools are best the day they ship.
Learn more: https://ae.studio/alignment
AE Studio is hiring: https://www.ae.studio/join-us
Subscribe to our newsletter: https://aestudio.beehiiv.com/
James Bowler LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-bowler-84b02a100/
Pedro Ávila LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavila/
Contact us: [email protected]
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By James BowlerIn this episode, James is joined by AE Studio Research Manager Pedro Ávila to discuss transitioning into a career in AI alignment, after Pedro left a 12-year career at Google to work on the problem full time. It’s a practical conversation about how someone from industry, without a PhD or a research CV, actually makes the jump.
Pedro traces his route from privacy engineer at Google, through the company’s early Responsible AI effort, to the realization that very few people worldwide work on alignment. A one-on-one consultation with 80,000 Hours led to an introduction to AE Studio; Blue Dot Impact courses, a stack of alignment reading, and more than 400 job applications later, he landed as a research manager at AE Studio. Along the way, he explains why AE’s business model: a consultancy whose revenue funds the research lab: is what convinced him this was the place.
James and Pedro make the case that alignment research is bottlenecked on more than researchers: capable operators, program managers, and especially ML engineers massively accelerate the people driving the research agenda. Demonstrating that a technique scales to billions of parameters means orchestrating dozens or hundreds of GPUs: hard engineering work that academic training doesn’t cover. That’s why AE indexes on engineering experience, and why “I don’t have the technical chops” is usually the wrong reason to stay put.
They also discuss AE’s new fellows program with the AI Alignment Foundation: hackathons in several cities aimed at helping industry engineers make the same transition: plus what changes when you move from a 150,000-person company to a 150-person one: week-to-week experiments, failing fast, and using whatever tools are best the day they ship.
Learn more: https://ae.studio/alignment
AE Studio is hiring: https://www.ae.studio/join-us
Subscribe to our newsletter: https://aestudio.beehiiv.com/
James Bowler LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-bowler-84b02a100/
Pedro Ávila LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavila/
Contact us: [email protected]