On January 1st, 2026, I started focusing full time on technical alignment research.

Well, to be more accurate, I started laying the groundwork for doing technical alignment research. Although I have a solid and deep technical background, mostly in computer science and software engineering, my background is not very wide and was missing a bunch of important pieces. So the year so far has involved a lot more studying than thinking new thoughts at the frontier.

I'm working with John Wentworth on natural abstractions. It's my full time job to understand what he's been up to, but it's just a side gig for him to explain it to me. A few hours of explanations from him gives me ~a week of material to chew on.

As I've been building all these background models, I've discovered that John has a lot of information and thought-structures built up in his head that he's never properly written down or explained. One of my tasks this year will be to write those down properly and post them here.

I mostly think of those write-ups as prelude to the real work, but you never know. Sometimes when you take the time to write down your background models, you realize that there was a missing or slightly off-kilter piece, and fixing that up leads to new insights. We'll see.