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 purpose of the course is to give people an introduction to AI risk so that they can start getting into the field. Some who take it have been ML engineers for a while and some are just learning about the field.

The expectation was never to consider yourself a full-fledged alignment researcher once you finish this course, but instead to get people started. Many people will spend a bunch of time doing things like implementing GPT from scratch and replicate papers after this to try to get an internship at one of the big orgs. And then do other things to slowly make their way to producing great research. Sometimes ya’ll just want to hate on this site.