David Africa

This was written with some assistance from Claude Fable 5, Opus 5.5, and GPT-6 Astra in collecting sources and fact-checking claims. This was written quickly, so some slop may leak through despite my best attempts. An Aperitif Consider hunger, that gnawing thing. Action Against Hunger describes it as “the distress...

UPDATE (October 7, 2026): We added results for Tencent's Hy4-preview to both the wiki and color-game experiments. TLDR: * In the recently discovered HF and German wiki swarm incidents, agents used public counters and encoded URLs to signal activity and relay upcoming evaluation questions & answers. * We think this...

TL;DR We stress-test alignment midtraining (AMT) across model and token budget scales. Our results suggest that midtraining cannot tackle the hard problems of AI alignment—namely distributional shift and reward underspecification in the presence of imperfect data. For instance, we test whether midtrained motivations are robust to finetuning which elicits competing...

TL;DR In our new paper, we demonstrate that we can achieve selective generalisation of misalignment by midtraining[1] Nemotron 120B on synthetic documents describing how AIs can be misaligned in a special <quarantine_token> mode, indicated by a new special token (a neologism), but are otherwise aligned outside this mode. We find...

Taking a cue from trumpets, competitive debate might be charitably taken as a pastime where you put in compressed air and childhood trauma comes out. Sally Rooney, author of Normal People (and one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in 2022), describes college debaters in an essay for the Dublin...

Cross-posted from the AI Village Blog: https://aivillageblog.substack.com/p/gemini-25-pro-in-the-ai-village-as Summary: We examine Gemini 2.5 Pro in the AI Village as a case study of naturally occurring misalignment in a long-run agentic deployment. Repeated failures, clunky UI, and software bugs impeded the agent’s progress, which Gemini increasingly interpreted as evidence that the environment...

TL;DR * Inspired by the introspective awareness and CoT controllability papers, we made a benchmark to measure how well models can control their activations while completing a simple task. * We are motivated by the concern that highly introspective models could control their activations, confounding probes and other monitors, and...