Hey, I’m Herbie. I try to help make artificial general intelligence go well.

Writing

I blog at AI Pathways with thoughts on technological development & governance, state capacity, and how we can unfold better futures.

Policy entrepeneurship

I advise governments, think tanks, and early stage startups on how they can steer AI development and anticipate its effects.

Previously I was at the UK AI Security Institute (and the Frontier AI Taskforce) in the UK Government from summer 2023 until October 2024, helping to build the team, advise on AI policy, organize the Bletchley Summit, and conduct research on evaluations for frontier AI.

Research

I’m a final year PhD student at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Engineering, researching ways to make synthetic data generated with LLMs more diverse and high quality—particularly with an interest in open-endedness. For a list of publications see Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar.

Throughout 2022 and 2023 I was a researcher at EleutherAI & CarperAI. At Carper I supervised a team of wonderful volunteer researchers on the design and development of OpenELM, a framework for combining evolutionary algorithms with LLMs to generate diverse and high-quality synthetic data.

Before that, I worked on AI applications to climate science & emulation of physical simulations. Before that, I worked on synthetic data for GANs.

Contact: mail [at] firstnamelastname.com.