Aditya Mehta

Got roasted for my cologne on Christmas Eve and accidentally had the best conversation of my year. 1 AM, empty Berkeley office. I’m reheating pizza when a 70-yo or so stranger goes: “I want to tell you something…don’t make me your enemy.” We talk John Mayer, post-9/11 America, BlackRock, dating advice, and he teaches me the art of subtlety.

i built jarvis on my friend's dining table in 72 hours! it's a dynamic projection surface that can generate interactions between objects, turning the table into a simulated playground i also made a decomposer that lets you play with the internals of any object :)

FAR.AI red-teamed DeepSeek’s V4-Pro and almost immediately found three ways in – achieving 98-100% compliance with harmful requests spanning CBRN, terrorism & explosives, and cyberattack content. The fastest of the three jailbreaks took just 15 minutes, with no expertise required. Slowest: only 150 minutes. 1/3

I made a stock market trader clone for AI safety grants to help people "paper trade" grant recommendations to train their grantmaking skills and demonstrate a track record without real money. Does someone want to own, publicize, develop, + maintain this? @manifund @NathanpmYoung

Open source AI likely can’t be “made safe for the world” long-term (it lends itself to increasingly extreme misuse). If you care about open source, you should be trying to “make the world safe for open source” (physical biodefense, cybersecurity, liability clarity, etc.).

The USG's mixed signalling on export controls has probably slowed down timelines. TSMC is already extremely risk-averse due to previous boom-bust cycles but their risk aversion is even more heightnened now that the USG's stance is all over the place. Which means TSMC will be less willing to build fabs, which means longer AGI timelines USG sends mixed signals about chip exports -> TSMC becomes more risk averse -> TSMC has lower appetite for building out fabs -> AGI timelines lengthen

Great post on AI Safety funding ecosystem from Sophie Kim and Ady Mehta thecounterfactual.substack.com/p/the-anthropi…

realizing i feel a spike of stress whenever i hear about a new model release (opus 4.7 today) everything is moving so fast, too fast, and i hope we can get our shit together in time

I’m co-founding Second Look Research with @zephaniahbroe and we are accepting summer fellowship applications for 2026! Fellows will come to the University of Chicago, complete 2-3 replications over 10 weeks (June 15-August 22), and work with external advisors. Fellows will receive a stipend of $10,000 and we will to cover housing and meals. secondlookresearch.com

a great life is not composed purely of having a bunch of great days. but it's pretty freaking hard to have a great life without a few of them along the way

If someone's tea > coffee but dog > cat, there's probably a depth to them waiting to be explored

@sunny_jayaram @CalBlockchain what a charming lad

@sunny_jayaram @CalBlockchain ex president is a funky guy

Wanted to say that the @CalBlockchain folks are some of the most friendly people I have met in Berkeley This group could easily be exclusive and self important due to their status here, but I’ve experienced only the opposite

@labenz @grok what is @labenz referring to

If I work at a frontier AI lab that works with the US federal government, I’m taking next week off in protest AI researchers don’t seem to realize how much power they have If we’re going to race to AGI, we should at least make sure we’re worthy winners

@hyusapx ☃️😰

introducing nod code for claude code. you start a prompt. you walk away. you come back to a permission message and no progress whatsoever. never again. Just Nod™ with nod code. it uses the secret sensors in your AirPods to detect nodding and shaking your head. install now.

@manav_a4 Type mood tho

Flow state rn

@manav_a4 Obscene timing of day, remarkable and slight concerning

10/ I wrote the whole night as a short essay. Maybe it'll surprise you how much of it isn't about cologne at all. Full story at: adymehta.substack.com/p/christmas-co…

Got roasted for my cologne on Christmas Eve and accidentally had the best conversation of my year. 1 AM, empty Berkeley office. I’m reheating pizza when a 70-yo or so stranger goes: “I want to tell you something…don’t make me your enemy.” We talk John Mayer, post-9/11 America, BlackRock, dating advice, and he teaches me the art of subtlety.

9/ But there's one line that stays among it all.

8/ Then a BlackRock rant. Then dating advice.