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Paul Christiano

Board Member, OpenAI Foundation; Senior Technical Advisor, US Center for AI Standards and Innovation, OpenAI

Verified interview transcripts, podcast appearances, and direct quotes from Paul Christiano, Board Member, OpenAI Foundation; Senior Technical Advisor, US Center for AI Standards and Innovation at OpenAI. AI-verified speaker identity with full-text searchable transcripts.

Recent appearances

  • Paul Christiano - Mechanistic Estimation - IPAM at UCLA

    August 31, 2026 · 📺 Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics (IPAM)

    Recorded 31 August 2026. Paul Christiano of the Alignment Research Center presents "Mechanistic Estimation" at IPAM's Foundations of Interpretability Workshop. Abstract: I will present a formalization of the conjecture that every surprising computational phenomenon has a good explanation. I will then discuss preliminary work aimed at explaining the behavior of simple computational systems and draw on historical experience in mathematics to argue that explanations might not only always exist but also be efficiently discoverable. Finally, I will argue that finding explanations for complex behavi…

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  • STOC 2026 - Theoretical Approaches to AI Alignment by Paul Christiano

    August 13, 2026 · 📺 SIGACT EC

    I'll survey a range of theoretically grounded approaches for aligning AI systems with human intent. The first half of the talk will ...

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  • ARC White Box Estimation Challenge — Town Hall

    July 15, 2026 · 📺 AIcrowd

    Jacob Hilton and Paul Christiano (Alignment Research Center) join the first town hall on the White-Box Estimation Challenge. Jacob walks through the challenge motivation, prize structure, and what's been observed in submissions so far. This is followed by an open Q&A covering scoring rules, code release policy, LLM usage guidelines, and technical approaches like cumulant propagation and quasi-Monte Carlo methods. Check out the challenge over here: https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/ar...

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  • Should we leave a helpful message for our successor civilisation? | Paul Christiano (2019)

    January 04, 2025 · 📺 80,000 Hours

    Originally released August 2019. Imagine that, one day, humanity dies out. At some point, many millions of years later, intelligent life might well evolve again. Is there any message we could leave that would reliably help them out? In his second appearance on The 80,000 Hours Podcast, machine learning researcher and polymath Paul Christiano suggests we try to answer this question with a related thought experiment: are there any messages we might want to send back to our ancestors in the year 1700 that would have made history likely to go in a better direction than it did? It seems there prob…

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  • Former Open AI Researcher Paul Christiano on Eliciting Latent Knowledge

    May 15, 2024 · 📺 Concordia AI

    Paul. Christiano alignment Research. Center eliciting lat knowledge. Okay thank you so much for being here Paul I'll hand over to ...

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  • Paul Christiano: Formalizing Explanations of Neural Network Behaviors

    October 31, 2023 · 📺 Sydney Mathematical Research Institute - SMRI

    Paul Christiano (Alignment Research Center): October 26 Abstract: Existing research on mechanistic interpretability usually tries ...

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  • Paul Christiano — Preventing an AI takeover

    October 31, 2023 · 📺 Dwarkesh Patel

    Talked with Paul Christiano (world’s leading AI safety researcher) about: Does he regret inventing RLHF? What do we want post-AGI world to look like (do we want to keep gods enslaved forever)? Why he has relatively modest timelines (40% by 2040, 15% by 2030), Why he’s leading the push to get to labs develop responsible scaling policies, & what it would take to prevent an AI coup or bioweapon, His current research into a new proof system, and how this could solve alignment by explaining model's behavior, and much more. 𝐎𝐏𝐄𝐍 𝐏𝐇𝐈𝐋𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐇𝐑𝐎𝐏𝐘 Open Philanthropy is currently hiring for twenty-two diff…

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  • Paul Christiano - How Misalignment Could Lead to Takeover

    September 01, 2023 · 📺 FAR․AI

    "How Misalignment Could Lead to Takeover" by Paul Christiano. Delivered at the 2023 San Francisco Alignment Workshop.

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  • Formalizing Explanations of Neural Network Behaviors

    August 16, 2023 · 📺 Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing

    Paul Christiano (Alignment Research Center) https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/pau... Large Language Models and Transformers Existing research on mechanistic interpretability usually tries to develop an informal human understanding of “how a model works,” making it hard to evaluate research results and raising concerns about scalability. Meanwhile formal proofs of model properties seem far out of reach both in theory and practice. In this talk I’ll discuss an alternative strategy for “explaining” a particular behavior of a given neural network. This notion is much weaker than proving that the…

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  • Paul Christiano on AI (animated)

    July 12, 2023 · 📺 AXRP

    Illustrated by ‪@hamishdoodles‬ Guest is Paul Christiano: https://paulfchristiano.com/ AXRP patreon:   / axrpodcast   AXRP ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/axrpodcast Clipped from episode 12 of AXRP:    • 12 - AI Existential Risk with Paul Christiano   Transcript: https://axrp.net/episode/2021/12/02/e...

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  • How We Prevent the AI’s from Killing us with Paul Christiano

    April 24, 2023 · 📺 Bankless

    Paul Christiano runs the Alignment Research Center, a non-profit research organization whose mission is to align future machine learning systems with human interests. Paul previously ran the language model alignment team at OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. Today, we’re hoping to explore the solution-landscape to the AI Alignment problem, and hoping Paul can guide us on that journey. ------ ✨ DEBRIEF | Unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-paul... ------ ✨ COLLECTIBLES | Collect this episode: https://collectibles.bankless.com/mint ------ ✨ NEW BANKLESS PRODUCT | Token…

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  • 12 - AI Existential Risk with Paul Christiano

    December 01, 2021 · 📺 AXRP

    Why would advanced AI systems pose an existential risk, and what would it look like to develop safer systems? In this episode, I interview Paul Christiano about his views of how AI could be so dangerous, what bad AI scenarios could look like, and what he thinks about various techniques to reduce this risk. Topics we discuss, and timestamps (due to mp3 compression, the timestamps may be tens of seconds off): 00:00:38 - How AI may pose an existential threat 00:13:36 - AI timelines 00:24:49 - Why we might build risky AI 00:33:58 - Takeoff speeds 00:51:33 - Why AI could have bad motivations…

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