Edward Grefenstette

Please see job advert for full details, or ping me any questions via DM. The team and I are looking forward to meeting many of you and hearing about your plans for the future!

We have world class engineering support to help scale and move fast, but we prioritize research scientists who can be self-sufficient, strong engineers in their own right, and are ready to occasionally work solo to show proof of life for their most ambitious research directions.

The ideal candidate would relocate to London and either complement or reinforce team skills. You should seek to formulate your own agenda in line with high level team and organizational priorities, while effectively weaving it into broader projects in and out of the team.

The Autonomous Assistants team is a small-but-growing London based team (currently 4 Research Scientists, 3 Research Engineers, 2 interns, and many collaborators). Interests span reward modelling, self-improvement, multi-agent systems, and evaluation design, amongst other things.

Job advert is here: job-boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/job...
Deadline: EOD Friday 1st August. Apply ASAP as we will look at candidates as they come in.
Please DO NOT apply if you're looking for internships, or are graduating in 2026 or beyond. Wait for appropriate postings.

Do you have a PhD (or equivalent) or will have one in the coming months (i.e. 2-3 months away from graduating)? Do you want to help build open-ended agents that help humans do humans things better, rather than replace them? We're hiring 1-2 Research Scientists! Check the 🧵👇

FYI this posting for a research scientist position in the autonomous assistants team at Google DeepMind will be open for a little under a week, as of today. Please consider applying if you are interested and qualify. See post for details, or ask questions here.

The team sits together, and researchers collaborate within the team and with a number of related projects. We minimize meetings to get work done, but also make space for more undirected research chat once a week, and social activities on a regular basis. Come join the fun!

The team works as part of our foundational research division, investigating the construction and evaluation of helpful agents and assistant-related technologies, drawing upon and further developing a variety of ML areas including RL/SFT/IL, self-play, program synthesis, etc.

Research Scientist, Autonomous Assistants London, UK

Apply here, and/or share it with someone who might be interested: boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/job...

The ideal candidate will have a PhD or equivalent, be willing to relocate to London (we help with visas and relocation). Please see the job posting for additional requirements and details.

Our team in London is hiring a research scientist! If you want to come work with a wonderful group of researchers on investigating the frontiers of autonomous open-ended agents that help humans be better at doing things we love, come have a look. Link in post below 👇

I'm with you.

So on that note, here is to a fun, productive, and hopefully less secretive 2025 for all of us. As always, I end with a link to the previous year's thread below.

Happy New Year, everyone! [17/17]
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In an effort to not overfit on the Google tech stack, I enjoy doing some local LLM development on my mac mini, tweaking neovim, playing with code assistant agents powered by competitors' LLMs (and playing with those LLMs in general), and generally having coding fun. [16/17]

I've also tried to find some time in between work and family time to get some new skills, including playing golf (poorly), the electric guitar (even more poorly), and more recently trying my hand at league of legends (super poorly). [15/17]

On the personal front, we set up a doctoral scholarship at @ballioloxford.bsky.social which welcomed the first three scholars. We're exploring making this a more long term thing. [14/17]

In 2025, we'll be down to a last few students in our group. Barring greater government investment in doctoral training centres, it's likely I'll wind up my involvement there around 2026, which is a shame. [13/17]

The other paper I really love is @lauraruis.bsky.social et al.'s investigation of whether LLMs just extrapolate from memorized facts, or actually learn processes, from the reasoning data. [12/17]
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A few great papers out @ucldark.com this year. To single out two I love, there's the already well-cited paper on Debate by @akbir.bsky.social et al. which got best paper at ICML! [11/17]

On the UCL front, we're happy to have several students wrapping up their PhDs or with job placements. @akbir.bsky.social is at Anthropic, Zhengyao cofounded Weco AI, Yicheng is at Meta, and Robert is at AISI. [10/17]

A lot of these ongoing projects, so if you're interested in working on this, keep your eyes peeled for new opportunities in the team in 2025 (knock on wood). There's other exciting stuff too, but unfortunately we can't be too specific. [9/17]

We investigated new methods for reasoning and scaling inference-time compute and search (a busy topic). We made some interesting inroads into how to approach grounded synthetic data generation. We explored new ways of designing evaluations and collecting data for agents. [8/17]

I've even been able to do some actual research with @minqi.bsky.social, @siangooding.bsky.social, @j5b.bsky.social, @noahgoodman.bsky.social, @joao.omg.lol, and many others. Nothing we can share publicly at this point (or possibly ever, in some cases?), but some themes are as follows. [7/17]

While the point about agency selfishly makes me yearn for the (relatively) more direct control one has in founding a startup, the work here is genuinely edifying and the mission is important, so I am happy with the trade-offs. [6/17]

Helping steer this ship literally feels like steering a large ship: hard to turn, but harder to stop when it's heading in the (right?) direction. It's like handling an object of enormous potential, without necessarily having much agency to control it in any meaningful way. [5/17]

I remain amazed by the magnitude of both resources and ambition as we work together to pursue a greater understanding of the frontiers of intelligence. [4/17]

There, I joined the board of the foundational research unit early in the year, and that has brought interesting challenges and experiences my way unlike those faced in my previous research roles, or in the leadership of startups. [3/17]

It will be potentially short in part due to my current role at Google DeepMind, as there is little I can share (and perhaps little that would be of external interest!). [2/17]

🧵 As 2024 wraps up, please pardon my usual self-indulgence in tweeting about the year gone by. 🧵

This will be a reasonably short one... OR WILL IT? [1/17]

We're inclusive like that.