Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…I mean James has Twitter injected into his brain, but yes. I think this is something which in practice is done. Like people do look out for people that they find interesting and try to find high signal. In fact, I was talking about this with Jeff the other day and Jeff said that one of the most important hires he ever made was off a cold email. I was like, “well who was that?” And he's Chris Olah. Chris similarly had no formal background in ML. Google Brain was just getting started in this kind of thing but Jeff saw that signal. And the residency program which Brain had was astonishingly effective at finding good people that didn't have strong ML backgrounds. One of the other things I want to emphasize for a potential slice of the audience is that there's this sense that the world is legible and efficient, that you just go to jobs.google.com or jobs.whatevercompany.com and you apply and there's the steps and they will evaluate you efficiently. Not only from your stories, but it just seems like often that's not the way it happens. In fact, it's good for the world that that's not often how it happens. It is important to look at, “were they able to write an interesting technical blog post about their research or are they making interesting contributions. ” I want you to riff on this for the people who are assuming that the other end of the job board is super legible and mechanical. This is not how it works and in fact, people are looking for the different kind of person who's agentic and putting stuff out there. I think specifically what people are looking for are two things. One is agency and putting yourself out there. The second is the ability to do something at a world-class level. There are two examples that I always like to point to here. Andy Jones from Anthropic did an amazing paper on scaling laws as applied to board games. It didn't require much resources. It demonstrated incredible engineering skill and incredible understanding of the most topical problem of the time. He didn't come from a typical academic background or whatever. As I understand it, basically as soon as he came out with that paper, both Anthropic and OpenAI were like, “we would desperately like to hire you.” There's also someone who works on Anthropic's performance team now, Simon Boehm, who has written in my mind the reference for optimizing a CUDA map model on a GPU. It demonstrates an example of taking some prompt effectively and producing the world-class reference example for it, in something that wasn't particularly well done so far. I think that’s an incredible demonstration of ability and agency and in my mind would be an immediate, “we would please love to interview/hire you.”…

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