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Comment by iamblessed_ | Hacker News Reader

I want to really get into anthropic.

For context: I have background in CV and ML in general. Currently reviewing and revising RL.

Any idea how I can get into RL?

I have 3 years of industry/research experience.

Whenever I see post like this, it triggers a massive fomo creating a scene of urgency on I should work in these problems.

Not being able to work here is making be anxious.

what does it take for someone in Non-US/Non-EU region to get into big labs such as these?

Do I really have to pursue PhD? I am already old that pursuing PhD is a huge burden that I can't afford.

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I'll address something else: Fomo is usually a symptom of an underlying deeper issue. Long before Anthropic/Openai, we had these same posts about people desperately wanting to get into Google. They got unhealthy obsessed about this goal that they started prepping for months, even years, documenting their journey on blogs only to get rejected by someone who spent 2 seconds on their application. Getting in is more about luck than most people realize. Once you're in, you had for a long time a skewed romanticized fantasy of what it's like to work at this mythical company (Anthropic isn't a startup by any stretch anymore) only to crash hard and realize it is a classic corporate environment.

It may be harsh but the reality is, if you have to ask you’re likely not a viable candidate.

The leading AI companies have the kind of capital to be able to hire the very best of the industry. If you’re only just starting now and even worse yet need your hand held to do so you’re totally out of the running…

so what would be wise to do in this situation? leave the hope and surrender or completely start out and work in a nascent field?

Build up experience. There's no shortcuts

You're basically like a junior dev trying to apply to be a lead dev for a team at Google

The pace is so fast, if you have FOMO you've already missed out most probably. If you're interested in LLM flavored RL, I'd suggest prime-rl (and their discord) community, hugging face RL courses with smol (you'll need pro and burn a couple of bucks), etc. etc.

Willing to burn few bucks here and there for the projects.

Really need to get hands dirty here. I remember taking RL course from coursera during 2020 covid. I didn't have the chance to apply it in the problems I worked post covid.

But I really want to start doing RL again. Interested in world models and simulation for RL.

If you're good on theory (meaning able to read theory), but interested in non-LLM stuff, pufferlib and it's programmer also seem quite accessible (if you haven't come across it already).

The hardest part of that journey is that there are a _lot_ of people out there now thinking the same thing. It is really difficult to get into these jobs without a network helping you.

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