James Bernardi

8-month salary to work on technical AI safety research, working closely with a DPhil candidate at Oxford/FHI.

In our last payout report, I wrote about our grant to David Reber to work with Michael Cohen on empirical demonstrations of Michael’s work. David has now stopped working with Michael, and Michael is looking to work with James instead (on the same project).

My thoughts on this grant are mostly the same as my thoughts on our previous grant to David to work with Michael, so I’ll just refer the reader to that report rather than repeat the same points here. The only additional nuance is how excited we are about James compared to David. I generally want to let Michael make his own decisions about who he wants to work with rather than second-guess him, so I won’t comment too much on that question. But I will note that James has a solid ML engineering background, and it seems like there is a reasonable chance that the project will end up working out.