[Expression of Interest] Research Manager, Interpretability

About Anthropic Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

Note: we don't have open Research Manager positions on the Interpretability team at this time. However, we're actively growing our team of Research Engineers and Research Scientists . If you're excited about interpretability research and open to an individual contributor role, we encourage you to apply.

About the Interpretability team When you see what modern language models are capable of, do you wonder, "How do these things work? " The Interpretability team’s mission is to reverse engineer how trained models work, and Interpretability research is one of Anthropic’s core research bets on AI safety. We believe that a mechanistic understanding is the most robust way to make advanced systems safe.

People mean many different things by "interpretability". We're focused on mechanistic interpretability, which aims to discover how neural network parameters map to meaningful algorithms. Some useful analogies might be to think of us as trying to do "biology" or "neuroscience" of neural networks, or as treating neural networks as binary computer programs we're trying to "reverse engineer".

We aim to create a solid scientific foundation for mechanistically understanding neural networks and making them safe (see our vision post ). We have focused on resolving the issue of "superposition" (see Toy Models of Superposition , Superposition, Memorization, and Double Descent , and our May 2023 update ), which causes the computational units of the models, like neurons and attention heads, to be individually uninterpretable, and on finding ways to decompose models into more interpretable components. 0 Sonnet, one of our production language models, represents progress in this direction.

” This is a stepping stone towards our overall goal of mechanistically understanding neural networks. A few places to learn more about our work and team are this introduction to Interpretability from our research lead, Chris Olah, Stanford CS25 lecture given by Josh Batson, and TWIML AI podcast with Emmanuel Ameisen. Some of our team's notable publications include and our Circuits’ Methods and Biology papers, Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet , Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning , A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits , In-context Learning and Induction Heads , and Toy Models of Superposition .

This work builds on ideas from members' work prior to Anthropic such as the original circuits thread , Multimodal Neurons , Activation Atlases , and Building Blocks .

About The Role

As a manager on the Interpretability team, you'll support a team of expert researchers and engineers who are trying to understand at a deep, mechanistic level, how modern large language models work internally. Few things can accelerate this work more than great managers. Your work as manager will be critical in making sure that our fast-growing team is able to meet its ambitious safety research goals over the coming years.

In this role, you will partner closely with an individual contributor research lead to drive the team's success, translating cutting-edge research ideas into tangible goals and overseeing their execution.