Saffron Huang

Hello! I’m Saffron. I’m a technologist, researcher and writer.

I’m a research scientist on the Societal Impacts team at Anthropic. We tackle big questions about how AI will change society, and use these insights to guide responsible AI development.

I previously co-founded the Collective Intelligence Project (CIP), which works to make AI development more democratic and use AI to strengthen democracy. For this work, my co-founder and I were named in the 2024 TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI list, and our work was featured twice in the New York Times. As an advisor there now, I continue to support their work on improving how society makes decisions about transformative technologies.

Before that, I was a research engineer at DeepMind, working on a hodgepodge of things including: language models, human-AI interaction, conceptual reasoning, value alignment, and multi-agent RL.

My bylines have appeared in WIRED, The New Statesman, Reboot and elsewhere. You can also find my thoughts at Substack and Twitter.

More stuff about me: I co-founded Kernel Magazine. I have a degree in Applied Mathematics-Computer Science, with minors in Government and German, from Harvard. I'm from New Zealand. And sometimes I do photography.

Selected Research

• Collective Constitutional AI - S Huang*, D Siddarth*, L Lovitt*, ..., D Ganguli* (*joint co-authors) (2024). Featured in the New York Times. Blog post.
• Beyond Static AI Evaluations: Advancing Human Interaction Evaluations for LLM Harms and Risks - L Ibrahim, S Huang, ...
• Using the Veil of Ignorance to align AI systems with principles of justice - L Weidinger, K McKee, ... (PNAS 2023)
• Generative AI and the Digital Commons - S Huang, D Siddarth (2022)
• Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models - E Perez, S Huang, ... (EMNLP 2022)
• Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher - JW Rae, S Borgeaud, ... (2021)

See more research → (or view on Google Scholar)

Selected Writing

• The Surprising Synergy Between Acupuncture and AI - WIRED.
• Collective Intelligence over Artificial Intelligence - S Huang, D Siddarth. AI Morality. Oxford University Press (2024).
• ChatGPT and the death of the author - The New Statesman.
• Control and Consciousness of Time - Summer of Protocols.
• Privacy and pluralism - what is privacy, and why does it matter?
• Turing-Complete Governance - on the power and potential of EVM arbitrariness for collective decision-making.
• Letters to a Young Technologist - a collection of essays written with some dear friends. I penned What is Technology? and To Be a Technologist is to be Human.
• Harvard Creates Managers Instead of Elites in Palladium Magazine - I also did a podcast episode on this.

See more writing →

Media

• TIME: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2024 - Saffron Huang and Divya Siddarth (TIME, Sep 2024)
• The Race to Democratise AI (Democracy Technologies, October 2023)
• Rewiring Democracy: can society control its tech destiny? (Culture3, August 2023)
• Aligning Technology Development with Public Input: A Conversation with Saffron Huang (C/Change, August 2023)
• Can AI And Democracy Fix Each Other? (The New York Times, April 2023)
• Alumni Profile: Saffron Huang, A.B. '20 (Harvard SEAS, April 2023)

Talks / Podcasts

• UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF 2023): Digital Democracy in the Age of AI (Oct 2023)
• OpenAI Forum: The Importance of Public Input in Designing AI Systems (inaugural event) - (July 2023)
• Panel at Civic Future's The Great Stagnation conference (July 2023)
• Demos: Collective Intelligence Panel (July 2023)
• The Rhys Show podcast (April 2023)
• Generative AI and Democracy at Bruce Schneier's International Workshop on Recreating Democracy (December 2022)
• Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models at EMNLP and IJCAI (2022)
• Palladium Magazine podcast (July 2020)