James Dao

It wasn’t long ago that finding an Asian American novelist in a local bookstore felt like finding a rare flower. Today, the options overflow. Viet Thanh Nguyen was on the leading edge of that wave. His first novel, “The Sympathizer,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. Since then he has written several more works and become a leading public figure, promoting the work of immigrant and minority writers and advocating for Palestinian rights.

Hey folks! Pleased to announce we have a new open position for a Founding Research Engineer at Harmony Intelligence. You’ll be responsible for measuring and identifying dangerous AI capabilities across various domains: cybersecurity, biosecurity, persuasion and manipulation, self-exfiltration and self-replication, and more. Location: We're a small but quickly growing remote-first startup, with folks in San Francisco and Sydney.

This is a linkpost for some exercises in sparse autoencoders, which I've recently finished working on as part of the upcoming ARENA 3.0 iteration. Having spoken to Neel Nanda and others in interpretability-related MATS streams, it seemed useful to make these exercises accessible out of the context of the rest of the ARENA curriculum. Links to Colabs (updated): Exercises, Solutions.