Harvard's Boaz Barak opens AI safety course mocking OpenAI conflict of interest
zainhas · x · 2026-10-19
Blogger zainhas recommends Boaz Barak's AI Safety course (CS 2881, Lecture 3: Modern LLM Training and Inference) and quotes its memorable opener: "sitting in an AI safety course taught by an OpenAI employee is like sitting in a climate course taught by an ExxonMobil employee" — a self-aware jab at the conflict of interest in safety education by frontier lab staff.
A course slide also frames deep learning as a method that is "simple, not stupid, and scales," with an analogy of a clever small-scale investor versus a multibillion-dollar index fund. The blogger vouches for the course quality.
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