Luca Righetti
This stream is primarily interested in mentoring projects in biosecurity that either (1) create rigorous threat models of AI biological misuse or (2) create benchmarks and tools that allow us to evaluate and mitigate these risks, as well as verifying that companies are taking suitable precautions.
Stream overview
Potential example projects for this stream include:
- Threat Model: What do inference compute trends imply for how fast dangerous biological capabilities may proliferate and become harder to monitor?
- Evaluations: Formalizing "scientific ideation in an empirical field" in a manner that allows one to assess human and LLM-generated hypotheses for novelty, plausibility, etc.
- Mitigations: Developing a way to more richly assess and describe the "blast radius" or "collateral damage" of efforts to remove-in-pretraining or unlearn material from LLMs
- Verification: How are we better able to standardize and compare the effectiveness of classifiers from different AI companies and assess how much they reduce misuse risk?
Mentors
I am a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Governance of AI, leading a work stream that investigates national security threats from advanced AI systems. I am also a collaborator at METR, where I help improve the rigor of system cards and evals, and a senior at the Forecasting Research Institute.
I am interested in mentoring projects that create rigorous threat models of near-term AI misuse, especially within biosecurity. Given that this work can include sensitive topics, the final output might look like writing memos and briefings for decision-makers instead of academic publications.
I am also interested in projects that try to strengthen the science and transparency of dangerous capability evaluations reporting. This includes creating standards and checklists, writing peer reviews of model cards, and designing randomized control trials that can push the current frontier.
Mentorship style
Typically, this would include weekly meetings, detailed comments on drafts, and asynchronous messaging.
Fellows we are looking for
For threat modeling work: Skeptical mindset, transparent reasoning, analytical
For evaluations, mitigations, and verification work: LLM engineering skills (e.g., agent orchestration), biosecurity knowledge
Mentorship will be a collaboration between me and my team at GovAI. The specifics depend on the candidate and project.
I am based in Berkley -- and some of my team is based in London.
Project selection
Mentor(s) will talk through project ideas with scholar