Zephaniah Roe

While OpenAI and Anthropic[1] pursue different lines of safety research, they have yet to produce a public-facing document describing concretely how their companies plan to align superintelligence. I think it is underappreciated how this points to general negligence or a lack of openness to third-party feedback. By “plan,” I mean...

> ... My salad days, > > When I was green in judgment, cold in blood > > To say as I said then! The UChicago AI safety group had humble beginnings. One day in 2022, after a dinner hosted by the school's EA group, a student was asking if...

tl;dr: Some important AI safety research is never rerun on the newest models. There are probably cases where this would be valuable and a single well-positioned researcher could likely do this with sufficient funding. This summer, Second Look Research (SLR) is running a summer fellowship dedicated to empirical replications of...

This is a replication of Adversarial Attacks Leverage Interference Between Features in Superposition, completed as part of the Second Look Summer Fellowship. tl;dr: * We reproduce all three core claims of Stevinson et al. from their toy classifier setting: * PGD attacks against toy models generally agree with theoretically optimal...

tl;dr: * Lindsey 2025 found models can modulate their internal states: when instructed to “think about” a concept while writing an unrelated sentence, the representation of the concept is more present than when instructed to not think about it. * Internal state controllability appears to be a general property of...

There is an idea floating around in the rough shape of "we need to accelerate capabilities that are differentially useful for safety research so AIs can help us make the future go better." The capabilities targeted are typically things bottlenecking alignment research, such as philosophical or conceptual reasoning. I feel...

At the risk of embarrassing myself, I’ll share a confession. For context, I took five years of Latin: four in high school and one in college. In addition to learning the language, all my Latin classes taught a lot about Roman history. Emperors, internal politics, Caesar, etc. I was always...