me

I work on reinforcement learning, language models and AI safety at Anthropic, where I tend towards RL- and engineering-flavoured projects. I'm also keen on effective donation.

That said, I'm chatty and happy to talk to most anyone about anything. The best way to get in touch with me is via email!

writing

anthropic

• A Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment: The two worst ways - prompting and fine-tuning - to align an AI.
• Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant: The third worst way to align an AI, RL on human feedback.
• Predictability and Surprise in Large Generative Models: Connects scaling laws (and lack thereof) with near-term impacts.

indie

• Scaling Scaling Laws with Board Games: Studying big AIs on big problems using small AIs on small problems.
• AI Safety Needs Great Engineers: AI safety labs are bottlenecked on great engineering.
• Debugging Reinforcement Learning Systems: Debugging reinforcement learning implementations, without the agonizing pain.
• A Clearer Proof of the Policy Gradient Theorem: A policy-gradient proof with less algebraic manipulation.
• The Recursive Approximation Algorithm, Animated: How n-body problems are solved in linear time, without any maths.
• Post-Mortem Python Plotting: Fixing numerical bugs after they've caused a crash.
• Are we in an AI overhang?: AIs might get much larger very quickly.
• Segmenting Microarrays with Deep Neural Networks: c. 2014, automation of a labour intensive part of DNA microarrays.

projects

major

• megastep: A 1m FPS RL environment.
• pybbfmm: A GPU-accelerated black-box fast multipole method.
• RL discord: One reinforcement learning Discord to rule them all.

minor

• fayin: An attempt at using WebSpeech to help learn Mandarin pronunciation.
• coolgpus: Custom GPU fan control for headless Linux.
• kvbtests: Heteroskedasticity-and-autocorrelation-robust statistical tests.
• modulepickle: Makes distributed dev feel local by auto-shipping your working dir to workers.
• zonotable: Nails Zotero's paper ingestion onto the side of Notable.
• tablatex: Adds LaTeX symbol autocomplete to vscode.
• nosearch: Adds reverse search to Jupyter notebooks.
• noterminal: Adds disposable notebooks to Jupyter.
• stripcommon: Strips the common whitespace when copying into Jupyter.

old

These are my portfolio pieces from my first year learning to program, c. 2013.

• Commutes & Rent: An interactive visualization of commutes and rent in London.
• A Global Shallow Fluid Model: An interactive model of the atmosphere on a rotating planet.

website

This website is rendered from Markdown into a minimal template by a short Python script. It uses a self-hosted Matomo instance for analytics, stripped down to only the details I'd see in the server logs.