AI Researcher

Hume AI is seeking talented AI researchers interested in working with our team to build state-of-the-art speech-language models (SLMs). Our new SLM training method—reinforcement learning from human expression (RLHE)—learns human preferences from behavior in millions of audio and video recordings, making SLMs superhumanly helpful, interesting, funny, eloquent, honest, and altruistic. Join us in the heart of New York City and contribute to our endeavor to ensure that AI is guided by human values, the most pivotal challenge (and opportunity) of the 21st century. About Us Hume AI is a Series B startup dedicated to building artificial intelligence that is directly optimized for human well-being. We’re gearing up to launch the next generation of Octave and EVI, our foundational speech-language models for voice generation and powering real-time empathic AI assistants for any application. Our models understand and generate subtle tones of voice, word emphasis, and more and the reactions of users. They are rated higher than models by OpenAI and others on empathy, expressiveness, naturalness, and speed, instantly speak with 100K+ unique voices and styles, stream language, emotion, and reasoning – all at once, and are fast enough to feel truly conversational (<300ms latency). Try them at hume.ai . Our goal is to enable a future in which technology draws on an understanding of human emotional expression to better serve human goals. As part of our mission, we also conduct groundbreaking scientific research, publish in leading scientific journals like Nature , and support a non-profit, The Hume Initiative, that has released the first concrete ethical guidelines for empathic AI ( www.thehumeinitiative.org ). You can learn more about us on our website ( https://hume.ai/ ) and read about us in WIRED , Forbes , and Venturebeat . About the Role We are looking for talented researchers with relevant publications, 2+ years of experience in a research role in industry, and/or a proven track record of contributions to open source language, audio, or video models. (A PhD is neither necessary nor sufficient.) In this role, you will build out software systems that support distributed model training, inference, and benchmarking as well as massive-scale data collection, storage, preprocessing, and analysis. You will be working to solve some of today’s most exciting AI research problems at industry scale. Requirements Expertise in the Python ecosystem and popular ML libraries and tools (e.g. PyTorch) Experience writing robust and maintainable production-ready code Comfort iterating quickly on new and uncertain research directions 2+ years of experience contributing to the training and/or fine-tuning of models with large-scale datasets of text, audio, image, and/or video data (predictive or generative) Application Note Please apply only to the position that best aligns with your qualifications. If you submit multiple applications or have applied within the past 6 months, only your initial submission will be considered. Annual Salary $180,000 — $350,000 USD