Gabriele Sarti

My Stuff

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Writeups and talks

Interpretability

AI auditing

AI safety and alignment

AI & philosophy

Personas and Simulation

Research

AI & society

Software engineering

Academia and industry career advice

Comedy

Courses

Interpretability

Other topics

Books

You can check out my Goodreads favorites. I’m generally a big fan of sci-fi novels3 and non-fiction — mostly historical accounts, (auto)biographies and science-related books. As a young teen, my favorite books were the Zamonien collection by Walter Moers. These days, I mostly listen to books on Audible.

Music

I grew up mostly on Led Zeppelin and Linkin Park, and I even used to sing sometimes. These days, I listen to a bit of everything. Here’s some less mainstream pieces you are less likely to have heard before (especially if it’s not in your native language):

Non-English

Movies and series

I’m admittedly not big on movies, and my favorites are mostly mainstream sci-fi stuff (Matrix, Arrival, Interstellar, Dune, Ex Machina, I am Mother), all Tolkien adaptations, and fantasy / sci-fi thriller series (Dark, Black Mirror, Westworld, Severance). A recent favorite less-known outside of AI circles is Pantheon.

Podcasts and video channels

AI and science — I mostly listen to Dwarkesh and the 80,000 hours podcast, and watch videos from Kurtzgesagt (mostly cosmology), 3Blue1Brown (mostly math) and Rational Animations (mostly AI safety).

History — my favorite podcasts are both in Italian: Qui si fa l’Italia (modern Italian history) and Il podcast di Alessandro Barbero (mostly medieval/reinassance history). I also occasionally watch Nightshift.

Geopolitics — I really like the diverse selection of RealLifeLore and the China-focused analyses of Polymatter. I also like the curated documentary-like format of fern and hoog.

Quotes

Science and understanding

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.
– Richard P. Feynman7

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
– Louise Glück

If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.
– Leslie Lampart

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.
– First Law of Mentat, Frank Herbert’s Dune

Software engineering

Up until a few months ago, the best developers played the violin. Today, they play the orchestra.
– Justin Searls

Software 1.0 easily automates what you can specify. Software 2.0 easily automates what you can verify.
– Andrej Karpathy

We build computers and programs for many reasons. We build them to serve society and as tools for carrying out the economic tasks of society. But as basic scientists we build machines and programs as a way of discovering new phenomena and analyzing phenomena we already know about. Society often becomes confused about this, believing that computers and programs are to be constructed only for the economic use that can be made of them (or as intermediate items in a developmental sequence leading to such use). It needs to understand that the phenomena surrounding computers are deep and obscure, requiring much experimentation to assess their nature. It needs to understand that, as in any science, the gains that accrue from such experimentation and understanding pay off in the permanent acquisition of new techniques; and that it is these techniques that will create the instruments to help society in achieving its goals.
– Turing award lecture from Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon (1975 Turing Award Winners)

Deep Learning

Reinforcement learning is sucking supervision bits through a straw.
Andrej Karpathy on the Dwarkesh Podcast

Footnotes

  1. A response to A Pragmatic Vision for Interpretability to advocate for “ambitious interpretability”. ↩

  2. This will make sense only if you are from Trieste. ↩

  3. I’m especially fond of short stories. My favorite authors are Ken Liu (The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories) and Ted Chiang (Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others). ↩

  4. I had the pleasure of seeing Moddi live in Groningen in 2021. ↩

  5. Surprisingly, one of the best covers of her famous “Paloma Negra” is in Serbo-croatian. ↩

  6. A fun Russian-Italian crossover here. ↩

  7. Especially true for interpretability researchers! ↩