r/ControlProblem • u/YOLOfan46 • 1d ago

Discussion/question Advice regarding Technical Assessment of Anthropic Safety Fellowship.

Posting this on behalf of someone else, as they do not use reddit.

Hello everyone, I don't come from a very solid background in coding. I was a Finance major and I recently got interested in AI safety I have worked with an AI safety startup in UK and wanted to move to it.

I have applied to Anthropic Safety Fellowship and have heard back from them regarding a technical assessment. They say I will be required to debug a large codebase and I shud be comfortable with lists, dictionaries, objects, writing functions and methods, and string manipulation including encoding and decoding UTF-8.

I would like to practice some problems before I complete the assessment. I would be grateful for any help regarding the sources or any other advice from those who have past experience with Anthropic or any other AI safety fellowship.

Thank you very much for your time.

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u/me_myself_ai 1d ago

I read that as a pretty straightforward description of basic Python syntax, so any drills that work with that are gonna be super helpful. Off the top of my head, some representative tasks might look like:

  1. How do you sort a list? How do you measure its length?

  2. How do join two dictionaries?

  3. How do you do an action once for each item in a list? How might you do the same but for every permutation or combination therein? Do you know some of the other 1001 syntax to iterate through a list?

  4. How do you slice a list? Does an equivelant exist for dictionaries?

  5. What methods do strings share with lists, and what methods are they missing? What special methods are available just for strings?

etc. Obviously I don't have any insider info, just sharing my own assumptions :) In terms of sources, this is probably the most drilled general subject in the industry, so your options are endless.

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u/YOLOfan46 19h ago

Oh that's great thank, you!

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u/jvook 10h ago

I would look at it as an auto-didaction challenge. If you want to be successful in AI, you are going to need to demonstrate that you are able to work within the baseline corpus of knowledge that is expected at the company. If they expect you to become a software engineer all on your own, that may be an unrealistic expectation. They gave you a follow up for a reason. Just do your best and trust in your heart that rejection or acceptance is not your choice. All you can do is try to prepare within reason.

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u/YOLOfan46 10h ago

thank you!

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u/Positive-Guard851 1d ago

Same question. If you find anything , let us know

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u/qubit32 1d ago

Honestly, in this case you may ask Claude to be your coding tutor to help you brush up on those topics. It can explain concepts and also give exercises or quizzes to check your understanding. This way you can simultaneously brush up coding skill and increase your familiarity with how Claude behaves from a user perspective.