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My Bay Area induction: a three-part story

blog.ninapanickssery.com · 2,131 words · saved by 1 readers

I landed in SFO for the first time between Christmas and New Year’s 2021. I was attending MLAB (“Machine Learning Alignment Bootcamp”), described as a “a bootcamp to bring people interested in AI Alignment up-to-speed with the state of modern ML engineering”. The organizers (Redwood Research and Lightcone Infrastructure) had paid for me, an alignment-curious Biomedical Engineering Master’s student from the UK, to come and stay in Berkeley for a month to study ML engineering and interpretability. Only a few months prior, I first learned about “EA” and “AI safety” and “Existential Risk” and “Rationality”. I had attended a few AI safety and EA reading group sessions at my university (Imperial in London) and the whole thing immediately fascinated me. Though I didn’t share the EA zest for impartiality, and said as much at the EA meetings, they were still happy to have me, so I kept coming. I thought (and still think) the EAs were cool because they cared about scale and actually achieving th

My Bay Area induction: a three-part story TLDR: it's cool Nina Panickssery Aug 10, 2025 14 1 Share 1. MLAB I landed in SFO for the first time between Christmas and New Year’s 2021. I was attending MLAB (“Machine Learning Alignment Bootcamp”), described as a “a bootcamp to bring people interested in AI Alignment up-to-speed with the state of modern ML engineering”. The organizers ( Redwood Research and Lightcone Infrastructure ) had paid for me, an alignment-curious Biomedical Engineering Master’s student from the UK, to come and stay in Berkeley for a month to study ML engineering and interpre

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