I'm asking you to consider leaving a comfortable position at a top research university for a startup with fifteen people and a questionable future. I know how absurd that sounds. But I also know you've been frustrated by the gap between what the research community knows about AI risks and what the companies building these systems are willing to acknowledge.
We have a chance to actually change the trajectory. Not through papers. Through systems that prevent harm at scale.
The offer: Principal Research Scientist. Build your own team. Define the research agenda. Publish what you can, ship what you must.
Jian Li COO, Inferthermic
Inferthermic: Intelligence to buffer the entropy Empirically proven 98% Risky Interaction Reduction (RIR)
Email 15 (from Alex):
Subject: Your Students Are Building the Future
Professor Alvarez,
Three of your former PhD students are now working at OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind. They're contributing to systems that will shape the next decade of human civilization. I know because I read their papers, see their commits, watch their presentations.
They're also working inside organizations where safety concerns get filtered through PR departments, where internal research gets classified as "competition-sensitive," where the incentive to ship outweighs the incentive to understand.