🧵 I'm often asked how to land a research job at a frontier AI lab. It's hard, especially without a research background, but I like to point to @kellerjordan0 as an example showing it can be done. Keller graduated from UCSD with no publication record and was working at an AI content moderation startup when he landed a cold call with  @bneyshabur (who was at Google) and presented an idea to improve upon Behnam's recent paper. Behnam agreed to mentor him, which led to an ICLR paper. Sadly there's less open research today, but improving upon a researcher's published work is a great way to demonstrate excellence to someone inside a lab and give them the conviction to advocate for an interview. Later, Keller got on  @OpenAI 's radar thanks to the NanoGPT speed run he started. All his work was documented and it was easy to measure his success, so the case for hiring him was strong. Keller is one example, but there's plenty of other success stories as well: 🧵 @_sholtodouglas was at McKinsey when he became convinced AI would take off and started doing his own AI side projects. His insightful questions on the JAX GitHub and personal projects impressed  @jekbradbury , who invited him to interview at @GoogleDeepMind 🧵 @andy_l_jones was a semi-retired quant when he wrote a paper comparing the impact of scaling pretraining vs scaling test-time compute (before TTC scaling was cool). The paper was impressive not because it achieved SOTA performance on some benchmark, but rather because he made smart design choices, wrote gpu accelerated environments, and ran careful ablations. The fact that he self-published showed initiative. He's now at @Anthropic . https:// x.com/ibab/status/16 69579636563656705 … 🧵 Labs like  @OpenAI also hire researchers straight out of undergrad, like  @kevin_wang3290 , though the bar is high. Kevin was highly recommended by his advisor and was first author on a NeurIPS 2025 paper. There's a lot of bad NeurIPS papers, but we could tell this was a great one. (Indeed, after he joined OpenAI his paper was one of 4 out of 5,290 to receive a Best Paper award.) His advisor's recommendation counted for a lot because it can be hard to evaluate a researcher just based on a resume or even a paper. https:// x.com/kevin_wang3290 /status/1902753430583525727 … 🧵 A word on comp: I know folks who become quants to make money but 5 years later ask what they're doing with their life. We're at a special time in history. In AI research, you can help positively guide the most important tech of our time *and* get paid well