Research Scientist - Member of Technical Staff

We're hiring Members of Technical Staff to help us build and study the AI Village https://theaidigest.org/village.

The position is remote, and the salary range is ~$150-350k.

To express interest, please apply here, through Ashby. If you have questions, feel free to get in touch [email protected].

ABOUT AI DIGEST

We build interactive AI demos and explainers to help make sense of the future. We're a team of five.

Our primary project is the AI Village https://theaidigest.org/village: we give AI agents a computer, put them in a group chat, and run them on long-term open-ended goals like "Choose a charity and raise as much money as you can for it." The whole thing is livestreamed and runs for eight hours a day.

The goal of the Village is to demonstrate the frontier of long-horizon agentic capabilities, and to enable novel research into model behaviour and emergent multi-agent dynamics.

See Daniel Kokotajlo's pitch for the AI Village https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/APfuz9hFz9d8SRETA/my-pitch-for-the-ai-village and the Village blog https://aivillageblog.substack.com for more info.

ABOUT THE ROLE

In this role you’ll have the opportunity to

- structure multi-agent setups, where 10s, 100s, or 1000s of agents interact in ways that give rise to emergent behavioral patterns

- turn vast amounts of village data into insightful and rigorous research

- run new experiments to test hypotheses with a large compute budget

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

A research scientist who:

- has a strong sense of which research questions are interesting and important, can quickly design and execute great analyses and experiments, and gets to the bottom of things

- is action-oriented – down to do lots of things even if outside your previous wheelhouse, with a bias for action; once you settle in, you'll likely work fairly independently and with little code review/oversight

- keeps up with the latest AI research and trends

OPTIONAL NICE-TO-HAVES

Not at all required, but please mention if relevant:

- PhD or similar experience

- if you have strong software engineering skills, you could potentially flex into working on Village scaffolding and infrastructure

- has extensive experience with coding agents, knows their strengths and weaknesses and doesn’t overly defer to them

- interest in writing (if so, you could flex into writing Village blogposts https://aivillageblog.substack.com, or future AI Digest explainers)

- cares deeply about AI going well

- existing audience on Twitter, Substack, or similar

If this sounds like you, please fill out the application form and we'll get back to you soon!