good question... thinking back to pre-LLM interviews I experienced (before 2019)… they were all in-person on-site, no chance of ''llm cheating,'' very different across places, and somehow way more memorable. > old deepmind had brutal ''quizzes'' -- 2-hour marathons with 100+ math/stats/ML concept questions. > meta FAIR was basically academia interview with a bit of coding, but the highlight was chatting vision research with piotr, ross and kaiming. > google brain/research was similar. the @NoamShazeer was my coding interviewer, who kindly kept it simple with just a two-pointer q. we spent most of the time discussing research, where I explained how I had applied something called a transformer to visual data (point clouds) -- a topic that, at the time, hardly anyone cared about. > but the coolest? openai in 2018: whiteboard coding, a research talk, and a *~5-hour* session in a tiny room to work on an RL problem (variance collapse in cross entropy methods). I knew almost nothing about RL, but that was the point. They handed you a self-contained problem description, handwritten by @johnschulman2, and expected you to learn, research, solve, write up in a notebook, and present. feeling a bit nostalgic. makes me wonder if interviews like that still happen anywhere. If they do, I’d love to know. :)