Pass if the person hits at least two of these in their own words. This is an editorial filter for a human operator, not a lab’s hiring rubric and not a credit score.
transformers / attention
pretrain / SFT / RL / RLHF
evals / benchmarks / capability vs safety
spec / governor / shutdown / alignment
interpretability / mech interp
data quality / contamination / reward hacking
systems: GPU, cluster, inference, context window
Fail: “I love ChatGPT” with no mechanism. Sales-only. No job target.