Michal Bravansky ✈️ ICML

Should Europe build AGI? Yes, if it could - but it can't. That's more or less my take-away from speaking to @anton_d_leicht. We talk about how middle powers might spend $500b to shoot for a non-American superintelligence, how to secure a slice of lightcone if they don't, and much more. 00:00 Why most countries face bleak AI futures 06:10 How middle powers can strike AI deals 12:17 The $500 billion AI moonshot 24:54 Would the US crush allied AI? 37:42 Is AI dependence catastrophic? 47:47 Policies to avoid mass AI layoffs 1:10:52 Why "pausing superintelligence" fails 1:21:08 Is an American AI monopoly safe? (Also - it brings me great pleasure to announce I've joined the 80,000 hours podcast. More to come from me).

Very happy to share the first paper from @ElasticityInst: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement. Two parts: (1) a graphical representation of feedback loops, to formalize a variety of RSI-related arguments, where each arrow represents responsiveness (elasticity); (2) a survey of existing evidence with a loose calibration & a “wish list” of evidence that would help us calibrate better.

I'll be presenting the CoT Controllability paper today in Hall A, Poster #2914, 10:30 AM - 12:15 PM KST! CoT Controllability was used as a safety metric by both @OpenAI and @AnthropicAI in their system cards. Visit me to chat about monitoring, agent safety, AI Control!

I've joined California state government! As AI Science Advisor at the Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), I'm advising senior leadership on frontier AI safety: critical safety incidents, AI and cyber defense, and risk from developers' internal deployment of AI.

I‘ll be repping @METR_Evals at ICML, and we're hiring! Excited to talk to folks about: - AI R&D Evals - Measuring research taste - Saving time horizon - How to collect tens of thousands of hours of human data in a couple months DMs are open :)

I joined @METR_Evals to help build out their monitorability effort. Our mission is to measure and inform the world about AI covert capability. I'll be at ICML next week. If you work on monitoring or AI Control, let's chat in person. My DMs are open! I’m curious about …🧵

I recently joined @METR_Evals. I'm studying AI R&D automation, with a current focus on measuring human uplift. If you're in the Bay Area or heading to ICML next week, I'd love to connect!

the miserable souls at the grinding heart of technocapital, convinced they the Calvinist elect of RSI, are grinding in San Francisco while the happy people are already Saved and partying in Europe this fine summer, unreachable on slack

A nice piece in the Economist today about projections of AI’s economic impacts economist.com/finance-and-ec…

I gave a talk a few months ago! My takes on research into model personas, intended as a relatively accessible primer for a broad audience Thanks to the FAR AI team for hosting! Check it out: youtu.be/yvB61EjvhMc?is…

the conda environment...I never deleted her...

I'm deeply concerned about Europe's future on AI. One of my biggest worries is our erosion of agency, our ability to stay relevant and fight for our values in a future where AI becomes a civilisationally important technology. Myself, @DadaJudith , @bakkermichiel and others have written a scenario to outline a potential future we worry we are on track towards. europe2031.ai Every optimistic and realistic path I can see for Europe runs through a central node - one where Europe has more leverage, more importance and more say. One where Europe grows more, builds more where it matters, and takes ownership over its resilience. Europe 2031 is a five-year scenario of the continent's slide into irrelevance: how AI is driving it, and what can still be done. The co-authors are researchers, scientists and investors who have advised European leaders, co-authored national AI strategies, built and funded these systems from the inside. We have no interest in hype and we deeply care about this continent. Europe 2031 ends with five concrete recommendations: - drastically more compute on European soil - an AI middle-power coalition - labour-market reforms - a bold position in robotics and industrial AI - and a positive vision of what AI can do for society. Europe can still change course if it finds the political will and the courage to engage in the most ambitious political and economic agenda the continent has undertaken in peacetime. I encourage you to read it if you have the time:

@jrosseruk @NeelNanda5 @GoogleDeepMind @cohere @acyr_l Congrats!

Career update! I've joined @NeelNanda5's Language Model Interpretability team as a contractor employed by Adecco, supporting @GoogleDeepMind! I'll be working on interp and data attribution! This comes after a fantastic internship at @cohere with @acyr_l! Lots of exciting work from that time to share soon!

OpenAI ran a hiring challenge, but the top candidate was one they couldn’t hire: our autonomous research agent, Aiden. In Parameter Golf, Aiden ran for 22 days, and out-outperformed all 1,016 other researchers: 🧵 (1/8)

I’m probably going to be hiring at least 1-2 people to join me in future exercises like this. Reach out at david@metr.org if you're a high-integrity, scrappy, creative, security+LLM researcher For more detail, see METR's Frontier Risk Report, Appendix B #anthropic" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">metr.org/blog/2026-05-1…

our frontier risk report contains the most serious public assessment of AI capabilities pertinent to AI R&D acceleration to date. it also makes clear how far the evidence base is from what might be achievable in future. x.com/METR_Evals/sta…

new (spicy) post from me: "Economists, mobilize" economics ideas are extremely helpful for understanding AI, but academia is dropping the ball. now is the time for economists to work on the most important problems in AI and to loudly encourage colleagues to do the same.