I’d strongly recommend trying again and reaching out to the friend of a friend who informed you of the role and asking for a more direct intro to the hiring manager. Unfortunately, it’s really really easy to slip through the cracks as a resume, and one feels no remorse rejecting a pdf file. Even without the warm contact, some way of directly reaching the hiring manager (notably: not the recruiters!) would mean that “I wrote that library!@ becomes front-and-center, not buried as a line item. I’ve seen so much more success with myself and the people I know in cold or warm outreach than through job application portals. In fact, I’ve yet to get a callback from a single job I’ve ever applied to online!
As an aside, does anyone know why the AI labs have such bad recruiters? I successfully got a job at one and am currently working there, but I still have many many complaints about the process.
Anthropic has a tough alignment interview. Like I aced the coding screener but got rejected after a chat about values. I think they want intense people on the value/safety side as well as the chops.
You need to be insanely dedicated to burning rainforests and boiling oceans so that people can have AI write emails that other people will use AI to summarise and never even read the summary.
What does Blockchain have to do with the energy usage of Microsoft's computing centres?
Are you trying to downplay the compute required to train and run inference on these large language models by stringing together some contrived comparison to the now 'uncool' Blockchain technology? That would be absurd.
Probably alignment with mission. The siblings write a lot about it so read all that. I prepped but I missed the mark. I suspect because of doing too ordinary work so I didn't have examples that would make them think "damm this person gets us".
Some one who reads the company website and has the communication skills to be able to convincingly regurgitate the company stances on issues. Come on guys, this isn’t some FBI lie detector test, they are going to ask you the same exact question people BS on in every interview to top companies, medical schools, etc.
Don’t be naive, these companies don’t care about talent they care about prestige and credentials. <username>@standford will always beat “did actual work relevant to the project”.
Just look at the background of some of the names in this at these places. As always it’s “who you know and where you’ve been” not “what you know and what you’ve built”
edit: You can downvote if you like, but it doesn’t change the fact that high stakes tech has never been a meritocracy and AI companies are no different.
I mean, there are three serious top level AI companies, and the only thing they're competing on right now is the quality of their frontier models. Or arguably their ability to raise cash, in an extremely "buzzy" market....
There's definitely more than 3 companies competing for AI talent and you know that very well.
Nvidia, Apple, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Tesla, Microsoft, Mistral and dozens and dozens of well funded AI startups are just among those with more resources.
Apple Tesla and Microsoft arguably really don't count. Microsoft is selling shovels. Tesla is, well, Tesla. Apple is not competing on frontier models, far as i can tell
I’d strongly recommend trying again and reaching out to the friend of a friend who informed you of the role and asking for a more direct intro to the hiring manager. Unfortunately, it’s really really easy to slip through the cracks as a resume, and one feels no remorse rejecting a pdf file. Even without the warm contact, some way of directly reaching the hiring manager (notably: not the recruiters!) would mean that “I wrote that library!@ becomes front-and-center, not buried as a line item. I’ve seen so much more success with myself and the people I know in cold or warm outreach than through job application portals. In fact, I’ve yet to get a callback from a single job I’ve ever applied to online!
As an aside, does anyone know why the AI labs have such bad recruiters? I successfully got a job at one and am currently working there, but I still have many many complaints about the process.