AI Safety Researchers Clash Over Lab Independence and Talent Tradeoffs
joshua_saxe · x · 2026-09-14
AI safety researcher Joshua Saxe and Halvar Flake argued over whether AI safety institutes can truly be independent from labs. Saxe says demanding independence ignores a real tradeoff: finding people who deeply understand LLMs and can do safety work, with funders, while being socially distant from labs is nearly impossible.
Flake strongly disagreed, arguing the nonprofit has built an exceptionally talent-dense safety team and that it "saved us" amid the dissolution of US CAISI under Trump. He concedes its security expertise is weak, but says security professionals should join rather than criticize.
More from Companies & People
- Stanford puts 10 full AI courses on YouTube for free, taught by Ng and Manning — stanfordnlp · 2026-10-31
- X now shows creators exactly which posts got visibility-limiting labels — XFreeze · 2026-10-31
- Stanford's 10 Free AI/ML Courses, From CS229 to Building LLMs From Scratch — stanfordnlp · 2026-10-31
- Recall Labs shuts down: agent trust and reputation network winds down — carsonfarmer · 2026-10-31
- Stanford CS336 pitches the road fewer take: understanding LLMs from raw data to trained systems — stanfordnlp · 2026-10-31
- Stanford Launches CS329Z 'Engineering AI Agents,' a Full Course on Building Agentic Systems — stanfordnlp · 2026-10-31