The inaugural Redwood Research podcast

After five months of me (Buck) being slow at finishing up the editing on this, we’re finally putting out our inaugural Redwood Research podcast. I think it came out pretty well—we discussed a bunch of interesting and underdiscussed topics and I’m glad to have a public record of a bunch of stuff about our history. Tell your friends! Whether we do another one depends on how useful people find this one. You can watch on Youtube here, or as a Substack podcast.

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Published:
January 4th, 2026

Source:
https://blog.redwoodresearch.org/p/the-inaugural-redwood-research-podcast

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Outline:

(00:00) Intro

(01:12) P(doom)

(13:46) Do we talk too little about weird stuff

(36:35) Papers where we feel jealousy

(45:02) History of Redwood Research

(45:57) Adversarial robustness and start

(53:03) MLAB

(57:48) Interpretability research

(01:04:04) Non-mech interp ambitious bets

(01:21:21) Back to the interp narrative

(01:26:11) Ryan's never-published mech interp research

(01:53:00) Early 2023

(01:58:05) AI control research

(02:07:57) Alignment faking paper

(02:16:02) Ctrl-Z

(02:20:15) Redwood size over time

(02:31:02) Biggest Redwood mistakes in the future?

(02:41:55) Listener questions

(02:42:10) AI Rights for Human Safety

(02:46:27) Neuralese models, CoT legibility

(02:51:19) Hyperstition

(02:55:26) Grumpiness about Tumblr-style alignment posting

(02:58:03) Control is about monitoring, right?

(03:20:34) How have our views changed?

(03:28:19) Should someone research AI alignment?

(03:33:56) What's the route to success?

(03:48:35) What to do if you're David Sacks?

(03:49:36) Mid career professionals?

(03:52:00) Conclusion

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Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p4iJpumHt6Ay9KnXT/the-inaugural-redwood-research-podcast