Daniel Johnson

I'm incredibly excited to be a part of what Transluce is building, and can't wait to see what we can do!

I'll also be moving to San Francisco soon. I'm looking forward to catching up with old friends and making new ones!

I am thankful to have had the chance to work with so many talented and creative researchers at Google. I'm especially grateful to Danny Tarlow and Hugo Larochelle, my original AI residency mentors, whose advice and support during my time at Google has helped me in so many ways.

And I believe the best way to reach an informed consensus about how to deploy AI systems responsibly is to build tools for scalably observing, understanding, and interacting with them. I'm especially interested in building tools that help us figure out the right questions to ask.

I believe the AI research field is still far away from understanding what behaviors and drives exist in these models, how they emerge, and which ones we should be watching for. Without this, we may overfit to specific known risks and overlook dangerous unknown failure modes.

This is important because today’s models do not always generalize in human-like ways, and rarely conform to expectations of what AI systems should do. Researchers are continuously discovering new emergent capabilities, idiosyncratic personality quirks, and puzzling blind spots.

I'm also excited to work on understanding the patterns behind model behaviors. How coherent are model personalities across contexts? When does it make sense to view LLM assistants as having intentions and goals, and how can we identify the goals that best explain their behaviors?

While at Google DeepMind, I spent much of this year working on open-source tools to help researchers look at model internals (penzai.rtfd.io, treescope.rtfd.io).

I'm excited to continue this line of work at Transluce, with the explicit mission of building understanding for the public good.

Personal news: I've left Google DeepMind to work on tools for understanding AI systems at Transluce (@transluce.bsky.social)!

I'm excited to build open tech for understanding and anticipating new AI behaviors, and to figure out what questions we should ask to make sure they are safe to deploy.