Y Combinator Paper Club brings Stanford AI Safety experts to apply aviation-grade methods to LLMs
ycombinator · x · 2026-10-18
Y Combinator's weekly Paper Club features Clark Barrett and Mykel Kochenderfer, Stanford professors and co-directors of the Stanford Center for AI Safety, joined by François Chollet, discussing AI safety as a science rather than headlines.
Key topics:
- Breaking down the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident
- How formal verification can mathematically prove properties of code
- Adapting aviation safety techniques—like aircraft collision avoidance systems with a standard of one catastrophic failure per billion flight hours—to language models
- AI safety as a research field with decades of conferences, methods, and engineering practice
Harj Taggar frames the takeaway: an engineering approach to AI safety is more productive than hyperventilating about it.
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