If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Hello! I'm Ryan, an empirical safety researcher interested in alignment and mechanistic interpretability. I am broadly interested in reducing existential risks from AI systems.
I am currently a Research Fellow in the Supervised Program for Alignment Research, under Santi Aranguri at Goodfire, where I'm researching internal representations of evaluation awareness in LLMs. I've been at Meta as a fulltime MLE/SWE (Causal ML Models) and Amazon as a SWE intern (EC2 Core Compute) among other places. I am now trying to make a career transition towards empirical safety roles and I am recruiting for fellowships and fulltime roles! I graduated from Georgia Tech.
I also do amateur field herpetology, and love all things reptile and amphibian! In particular I am especially interested in Pythons and Anurans (frogs and toads), and believe that snakes are highly misunderstood and beautiful creatures. I enjoy learning about animal phylogenies and the evolutionary pressures that shaped them to evolve particular traits for the sake of optimizing towards reproducing (and all instrumental goals involved in reproduction, like surviving). On a related note, I find it entertaining and helpful to think about AI alignment problems in terms of evolutionary pressures and biological analogs!
A couple of links about me:
If you so desire, you can contact me via email. In general if you are considering emailing me, I would bias towards doing so! I am very accepting of people reaching out to me to chat, regardless of background. Either of these emails will reach me, but the first one is monitored more closely: