AI DOOM: Jesse Hoogland of Timaeus

This is the second episode of our series based on interviews for the documentary film, Dreamers and Doomers, about the SF Bay Area in the last days before AGI. 

Steve interviews Jesse Hoogland, co-founder and executive director of Timaeus, an AI safety research org working on applications of Singular Learning Theory (SLT) for AI safety. SLT establishes a connection between the geometry of the loss landscape and internal structure in models. This connection is used to develop scalable, rigorous tools for evaluating, interpreting, and aligning neural networks. Jesse is one of the leading young minds in the new generation of AI safety researchers.

https://www.jessehoogland.com/

• (00:00) - Jesse interview at FAR Labs, Berkeley
• (00:54) - Introduction
• (01:50) - From Physics to AI Safety
• (08:36) - AI Is Dangerous
• (26:08) - Funding, P(Doom), and Futures
• (56:21) - Trauma and Safety Vibes
• (01:00:39) - Asymptotic Guarantees Debate
• (01:03:54) - Mapping the Safety Tribes
• (01:26:09) - Timelines, AI Pause, and Failure Modes

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Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to manifold1podcast@gmail.com or Steve on X @hsu_steve.

Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. 

Mechanize is hiring! 

https://mechanize.work/b/hsu 

Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. 

For example: 

Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary 

Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary 

Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.