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

Recent

The Western AI safety playbook doesn’t transfer to China

9 Nov 202628 min readListen, 45 min◆◆◇

• 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.

  15 Sep 202612 min readListen, 18 min◆◆◇

• How I Came to Take AI Risk Seriously

  My path from dismissing AI risk to working on AI safety, and the effort to think clearly amid fear, social pressure, and uncertainty.

  13 Sep 20263 min readListen, 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.

  24 Sep 202536 min readListen, 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.

  19 May 20266 min readListen, 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.

  9 Jan 20263 min readListen, 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.

  9 Jan 20264 min readListen, 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.

  8 Aug 202511 min readListen, 20 min◆◆◇

Everything, by year, in the archive