Daniel Filan

About me

I'm currently a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley being supervised by Stuart Russell. I do ML research relevant to ensuring that future artifical intelligences who may be much smarter than us behave in a safe way. Discussions of problems in this area are available here, here, and here.

I have a blog where I write about topics of interest to me: as of the time I write this, there are posts about forecasting, math, and puzzles.

I also have a podcast about this field of research. It's called AXRP, which is short for the AI X-risk Research Podcast. You can listen to episodes on Google podcasts, or by searching "AXRP" in your favourite podcast app. Alteratively, you can read transcripts here.

In addition to AXRP, I have another podcast called The Filan Cabinet, where I talk to people about whatever I want. Episodes are available on Google podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'm interested in effective altruism, how we can use our limited resources to do the most good in the world. I also sometimes bet on things, for reasons described by Bryan Caplan and Immanuel Kant.

I did my undergrad at the Australian National University, studying the theory of reinforcement learning, mathematics, and theoretical physics. I did my honours year (similar to a research master's degree lasting one year) under Marcus Hutter; you can read my thesis "Resource-bounded Complexity-based Priors for Agents" here.

Papers

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