It seems like most people I see billing themselves as an “AGI researcher” or discussing alignment on Twitter (or irl in SF) have no actual background in AI/ML.
“The creator of the course was a research engineer at DeepMind and now works at OpenAI. Several people at those orgs have acted as facilitators for the course since its creation.”
The course is an intro to AI risk. Nobody acts like an AGI safety researcher when they finish the course with no ML experience. The majority keep skilling up for a while, which includes replicating ML papers.
Me personally, I started doing ML in 2015 and got into AI alignment in early 2022.