The Real AI Alignment Problem

This was a talk I gave at the AI for Peace Workshop at ICLR 2026. The whole workshop was amazing and I want to give so much thanks to the organizers and other speakers. Having these kinds of discussions, especially at a large ML conference like ICLR, is super important and I hope there is a lot more of this in the future!

https://aiforpeaceworkshop.github.io

This talk summarizes a lot of thinking and investigation I did in the aftermath of leaving AI research after YOLOv3. None of these ideas are original or unique I’m just approximately parroting the thoughts of much smarter people. There’s a lot of topics I touch on very lightly that are worth investigating more. If you’re interested here’s some starting points I’d recommend:

• All of Einstein’s writings (Ideas and Opinions is a good collection)
• Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky (even though he’s in the Epstein files, ugh, he has very good insights on power and influence)
• Macroeconomics by Mitchell, Wray, and Watts
• Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) by Jane McAlevey
• The 5-4 Podcast
• Citations Needed Podcast with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson
• Early episodes of the Current Affairs podcast until Nathan fired all the cool people (for trying to unionize, yikes)

The slides can be found here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WRA6e4Qj3Iqsj1oj2SUZdOSnVUYv5JUweqO886scOhw/edit?usp=sharing

Interested in AI for the Environment??

I’m working on the OlmoEarth team at Ai2 building state-of-the-art AI for environmental and humanitarian groups.

Platform: OlmoEarth Platform

Project blog: OlmoEarth

Technical blog: OlmoEarth Models

Paper (CVPR 2026): OlmoEarth

Github: olmoearth_pretrain

Welcome to my website!

I am a research scientist at Ai2 working on machine learning for the environment.

I was a graduate student advised by Ali Farhadi. I work on computer vision.

I maintain the Darknet Neural Network Framework, a primer on tactics in Coq, occasionally work on research, and try to stay off twitter.

Outside of computer science, I enjoy skiing, hiking, rock climbing, and playing with my Alaskan malamute puppy, Kelp!

Talks and teaching

The Real AI Alignment Problem - AI for Peace Workshop, ICLR 2026

The Ancient Secrets of Computer Vision - University of Washington, Spring 2018

Computers can see. Now what? - TEDxGateway in Mumbai, India

How computers learn to recognize objects instantly - TED2017 in Vancouver, Canada

Publications

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