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

 

I’m co-director of the Collective Intelligence Project, a research and policy organization looking to improve and leverage humanity’s collective intelligence to better govern and thus benefit from transformative technologies such as AI.

 

I previously was a research engineer at DeepMind, investigating and engineering large language models, as well as conceptual reasoning, ethics and safety in machine learning.

 

I have a degree in Applied Mathematics-Computer Science, with minors in Government and German, from Harvard. I hail from New Zealand and I quite like photography, concerts, park benches and holing up with a book.

 

Updates
  • November 2022: Wrote my first piece in the New Statesman.
  • November 2022: I’m on the Advisory Council of Civic Future, an initiative to identify talented people and enable them towards contributing to policy and public service.
  • October 2022: Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models was accepted at EMNLP 2022.
  • September 2022: Kernel Magazine (the magazine I co-founded) issue 2 is out.
  • August 2022: Excited to announce that I am co-directing the Collective Intelligence Project with Divya Siddarth. If we can collectively govern, own, or have input on transformative technology, we will be able to steer the most significant engine of societal change for the better.
  • August 2022: Josh Stark of the Ethereum Foundation and I spent many months writing a piece on consistent patterns of centralization in past information technologies (e.g. radio, film, telephone and TV) and what crypto can learn from it. We put forward some fun, scary “statechain” scenarios, trying to predict the traffic jam, not just the automobile.
  • August 2022: I presented at the Interact Summer Symposium on how we structure our digital information flows. Some of the research ended up or will end up on my substack.
  • July 2022: Presented Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models at the IJCAI 2022 Evaluation Beyond Metrics workshop in Vienna.
  • March 2022: My work on toxicity metrics of large language models is a top takeaway in the AI Index Report of 2022.