Welcome post from a new research group
New group at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen and Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
We started a Substack for our AI Safety and Alignment Group! We will post regular research updates and general thoughts about where this whole AI thing is going.
Our group. We focus on developing algorithmic solutions to reduce harms from advanced general-purpose AI models. We are particularly interested in alignment of autonomous LLM agents, which are becoming increasingly capable and pose a variety of emerging risks. We are also interested in rigorous AI evaluations and informing the public about the risks and capabilities of frontier AI models. Additionally, we aim to advance our understanding of how AI models generalize, which is crucial for ensuring their steerability and reducing associated risks. For more information about research topics relevant to our group, please check the following documents: International AI Safety Report, An Approach to Technical AGI Safety and Security, and Open Philanthropy’s 2025 RFP for Technical AI Safety Research.
Research style. We are not necessarily interested in getting X papers accepted at NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR. We are interested in making an impact: this can be papers (and NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR are great venues), but also open-source repositories, benchmarks, blog posts, even social media posts—literally anything that can be genuinely useful for other researchers and the general public.
Broader perspective. Current machine learning methods are fundamentally different from what they used to be pre-2022. The Bitter Lesson summarized and predicted this shift very well back in 2019: “general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective“. Taking this into account, we are only interested in studying methods that are general and scale with intelligence and compute. Everything that helps to advance their safety and alignment with societal values is relevant to us. We believe getting this—some may call it “AGI”—right is one of the most important challenges of our time. Join us on this journey!