YC Paper Club Tackles AI Safety Science with Stanford Professors, Formal Verification and Aviation Standards
ycombinator · x · 2026-10-17
This week's YC Paper Club focused on the science of AI safety, featuring Stanford professors Mykel Kochenderfer and Clark Barrett, co-directors of the Stanford Center for AI Safety, joining François Chollet.
Key points:
- Grounded in engineering safety science: AI safety has decades of research history with its own conferences and methods. Aircraft collision avoidance systems serve as the benchmark — a standard of one catastrophic failure per billion flight hours.
- Breaking down the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident and its lessons.
- Formal verification: how to mathematically prove properties of code.
- Adapting aviation safety techniques to language models, and why AI may need aviation-style certification.
Chollet called it one of the best Paper Club sessions yet — "real AI safety ideas, grounded in science, not science fiction."
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