Hello, I'm Jacques. I work on AI alignment.

The transition to advanced AI, and how to make it go well.

Recent

  • Read Dan Selsam on AI Risk

    Dan Selsam’s statement on AI risk is my recommended reading this week, alongside some thoughts on the debate about AI safety funding.

      12 min read  ◆◆◇  Listen, 18 min

  • How I Came to Take AI Risk Seriously

      3 min read  ◇◇◇  Listen, 4 min

  • Automated alignment research needs a better plan than 'Stop if we catch them scheming'

    My PIBBSS Symposium talk from September 2025, with the deck and the full transcript, on why the dual-use worry is overblown.

      35 min read  ◆◆◆  Listen, 63 min

  • Fooled by Vast Knowledge

    Models look like they generalise because the training data is vast enough to hide the difference between interpolation and extrapolation. I think that confusion is leading safety research astray.

      6 min read  ◆◆◆  Listen, 9 min

  • Difficulties in Building an AI Safety Startup

    Guardrails, evals, RL environments, control infrastructure. I work through each one and keep landing in the same place, too far from what happens inside a frontier lab.

      3 min read  ◆◆◇  Listen, 6 min

  • Gaining clarity on Automated Alignment Research

    Four different things get conflated in the phrase automated alignment research, and the crux is whether applying techniques we already have is a short step from inventing a new paradigm.

      4 min read  ◆◆◇  Listen, 6 min

  • Automating AI Safety: What we can do today

    A concrete list of things to build now so a coding agent can actually run an interpretability experiment, and why the METR slowdown result does not say what people think.

      11 min read  ◆◆◇  Listen, 20 min

Everything, by year, in the archive

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