Becoming a Research Engineer at a Big LLM Lab • Hacker News Board

Re: Becoming a Research Engineer at a Big LLM Lab

#21

Post by angarg12 » Sun, Jul 26, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

wordpad wrote: post #8

angarg12 wrote: post #5

My last job search 2 years ago took me 9 months of grinding while working full time at Big Tech and +15 years of experience. After loops with ~30 companies I ended up with about 6 offers. The offers were all over the shop. Some places downleveled me to mid level while others upleveled me. The comp range was about 3x between the lowest and the highest. Also I couldn't find much of a pattern on the processes and outcom…

Were most interviews focused on DSA and System Design still?

Mostly yes. But there were also some take home assignments, some culture fit loops, and many ML rounds, since I was applying for an ML role.

Re: Becoming a Research Engineer at a Big LLM Lab

#22

Post by wilbur_whateley » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #10

dosisking wrote: post #9

This article is why I see LLM's as a dead end and not real AI. LLM's are somewhat useful for things related to language. LLM's are a decent search engine. But LLM's are not AI.

How would you define AI? It seems they can do a lot of useful things. They are very good for processing language and I find Claude Code to be a better coder than a lot of human programmers.

To me, AI is about the ability to solve novel problems. People who think supervised learning can do that usually believe that new knowledge comes from (1) combining old ideas, and (2) trial and error. I don't think that's true. If you think about the state space of all possible ideas, it's clear that humans can explore a very small subset of that space and supervised learning just imitates humans (with great speed and memory). RL also doesn't work, but it at least attempts to learn independently of human knowledge.

Re: Becoming a Research Engineer at a Big LLM Lab

#23

Post by vjvjvjvjghv » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

wilbur_whateley wrote: post #22

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you define AI? It seems they can do a lot of useful things. They are very good for processing language and I find Claude Code to be a better coder than a lot of human programmers.

To me, AI is about the ability to solve novel problems. People who think supervised learning can do that usually believe that new knowledge comes from (1) combining old ideas, and (2) trial and error. I don't think that's true. If you think about the state space of all possible ideas, it's clear that humans can explore a very small subset of that space and supervised learning just imitates humans (with great speed an…

That sets the bar pretty high for intelligence and by that standard there probably aren't too many humans who have intelligence.

Re: Becoming a Research Engineer at a Big LLM Lab

#24

Post by wilbur_whateley » Mon, Jul 27, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #23

wilbur_whateley wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, AI is about the ability to solve novel problems. People who think supervised learning can do that usually believe that new knowledge comes from (1) combining old ideas, and (2) trial and error. I don't think that's true. If you think about the state space of all possible ideas, it's clear that humans can explore a very small subset of that space and supervised learning just imitates humans (with great speed an…

That sets the bar pretty high for intelligence and by that standard there probably aren't too many humans who have intelligence.

I think humans and other life forms have this ability on a long enough timeline through evolution.