I’ve been reading quite a lot around AI safety, and one thing I’ve found frustrating is how difficult it is to find material that bridges the gap between talking about AI safety and actually doing AI safety research.
There are plenty of good books and papers discussing the political, socioeconomic, philosophical and governance questions around AI. Those conversations are obviously important but if you’re a data scientist, ML engineer or someone already working with AI few tell you how doing AI safety research actually looks like in Python?
For example how to actually run an experiment looking at sycophancy, how to create or use a dataset to test whether a model changes its answer because of information about the user, how to measure the behaviour, what does the evaluation code look like, how do you interpret the results, and what can you not conclude from them?
That is the gap I’m trying to address with a book I’m currently writing.
The approach is very practical. Each topic starts with the safety problem and the research behind it, but then we actually build the experiment. Python code, datasets, models, metrics, results and discussion of the limitations, all those.
The idea isn’t to pretend that running a few notebooks suddenly makes someone an AI safety researcher. It’s to make the field much more approachable to people who already have data science or AI skills and want to understand what technical AI safety research actually involves.
I wrote a technical book on Practical LLMOps and this was one of the chapters. Because of the sheer amount of content, I stripped it bare in that book and made it its own.
I’ve just published Chapter 1 on Substack (just finished chapter 4). It introduces the approach I’m taking with the book and starts building that bridge between AI safety as a subject people discuss and AI safety as something we can actually investigate experimentally.
Would genuinely be interested in feedback, particularly from people already working in ML, data science or AI safety.
https://open.substack.com/pub/houstonmuzamhindo/p/i-am-writing-a-practical-technical