Stephen McAleese

The recent book “If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies” (September 2025) by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares argues that creating superintelligent AI in the near future would almost certainly cause human extinction: > If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like...

WebsiteEditorialRepo Change in 18 latent capabilities between GPT-3 and o1, from Zhou et al (2025) This is the third annual review of what’s going on in technical AI safety. You could stop reading here and instead explore the data on the shallow review website. It’s shallow in the sense that...

Summary The goal of this post is to analyze the growth of the technical and non-technical AI safety fields in terms of the number of organizations and number of FTEs working in these fields. In 2022, I estimated that there were about 300 FTEs (full-time equivalents) working in the field...

2 minute summary * At a high level, a transformer-based LLM is an autoregressive, next-token predictor. It takes a sequence of "tokens" (words or parts of words) as input and produces a prediction for what the next token should be. This prediction takes the form of a probability distribution. Sampling...

Introduction By now you've probably read about how AI and AGI could have a transformative effect on the future and how AGI could even be an existential risk. But if you're worried about AI risk and not an AI researcher or policymaker, can you really do anything about it or...

from aisafety.world The following is a list of live agendas in technical AI safety, updating our post from last year. It is “shallow” in the sense that 1) we are not specialists in almost any of it and that 2) we only spent about an hour on each entry. We...

Introduction Geoffrey Hinton is a famous AI researcher who is often referred to as the "godfather of AI" because of his foundational work on neural networks and deep learning from the 1980s until today. Arguably his most significant contribution to the field of AI was the introduction of the backpropagation...