Jack Koch

I graduated from Yale with a B.S. in Applied Mathematics and a concentration in Computer Science in May 2019. At Yale, I conducted NLP research under the supervision of Professor Dragomir Radev in the Language, Information, and Learning at Yale (LILY) Lab.

After graduation, I spent some years working on technical AI safety and alignment research. I co-led a project at the AI Safety Camp that produced the first empirical demonstrations of a new kind of robustness failure, goal misgeneralization. I also completed a summer fellowship at the Center on Long-term Risk, where I sought to understand takeaways from Dennett’s intentional stance and the human brain itself for thinking about agency in the context of AI safety.

During that time, I was also practicing meditation and seeking the end of suffering. After finding what I was looking for, my motivation and focus shifted to working directly on reducing the suffering of others. Recently, I have been working with the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS) on their suffering quantification project while looking for full-time opportunities where I can apply my background and skills to projects and initiatives that reduce suffering most effectively.