David Africa

Tl;Dr: * We might be able to reduce harm from misaligned AI if it was sufficiently risk-averse, as it could be paid to cooperate rather than rebel (Thornley & MacAskill 2026). * We think character training might be a good way to do this. * We use a short spec/constitution...

David Africa & Nick Levine TLDR We ran several persona experiments on Talkie, a 13B model trained only on English text from before 1931. We ran them alongside its modern twin (same architecture, trained on regular data as a control) and Llama-3.1-8B. * Talkie can generalise maliciously. You can fine-tune...

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...