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Oscar Balcells Obeso

individual · Manifund

Technical AI safety research

Received
$46,000
from 2 funders
Grants
2
Funders
2
Years active
2024–25

Grants over time

$0$20K$40K$60K20242025
Long-Term Future FundNeel Nanda

Biggest funders

Long-Term Future Fund$40,00087%1
Neel Nanda$6,00013%1

Reviews

Neel Nanda · Manifund · full post · May 8, 2025

Hallucination Detector, May 2025

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I've supervised Javier & Oscar for a paper before, and they've done great work. I think this project seems promising - to my knowledge there's been little work on long-form hallucination detection, I expect there's low hanging fruit here, and the results seem decent so far. This is a fairly small grant, and will help unblock the project, so feels like a no-brainer to me

I think that detecting hallucinations in long-form content is a good downstream task to improve monitoring methods on (and find insights that translate to higher stakes tasks like control or deception), in addition to being near-term useful for making models safer. Improving factuality is likely to also help with making systems more profitable, which is slightly accelerationist, but I am generally pro work that legibly demonstrates how safety is incentivised by profit-seeking.

CoI Note: I am a (very hands off) supervisor for this project and will likely be a co-author on the paper resulting from this. But my quality bar for spending time on a project is notably higher than my bar for regrants, so I don't feel too concerned

Grants received

Date ↓FunderViaAmountCauseSourcePurpose
May 16, 2025Neel NandaManifund$6,000InterpretabilitymanifundHallucination Detector
Jan 2024Long-Term Future FundEA Funds$40,000Interpretabilityea_funds4-month stipend to research the mechanisms of refusal in chat LLMs