Buck Shlegeris

Buck Shlegeris is an AI-alignment researcher who worked at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Berkeley, California, and became chief technology officer and later chief executive of Redwood Research. Redwood's tax returns list him as Michael Shlegeris.¹

Machine Intelligence Research Institute

In an "Ask Me Anything" post on the Effective Altruism Forum dated 15 November 2019, Shlegeris described himself as "a researcher at MIRI" who divided his time "roughly equally between technical work and recruitment/outreach work." He wrote that he handled the intake of participants for MIRI's "AI Risk for Computer Scientists" workshops and taught at them, did "most of the technical interviewing for engineering roles at MIRI," and managed the AI Safety Retraining Program, "in which MIRI gives grants to people to study ML for three months." On the technical side, he wrote, "I mostly work on some of our nondisclosed-by-default technical research," adding that "Because the work isn't public, there are many questions about it that I can't answer."²

On 13 February 2021 an applicant asked on the forum LessWrong whether Shlegeris still worked for MIRI, writing that the first stage of its software engineering interviews had been a quiz administered by the recruiting company Triplebyte. Anna Salamon, a director of MIRI, replied that "Buck is mostly no longer working at MIRI but is doing some contracting, including about processing job applicants I think." Shlegeris wrote that he was "still in the business of talking to people who want to work on alignment stuff" and was "indeed still the person who processes MIRI job applications."³⁴ MIRI's return for 2019 lists Eliezer Yudkowsky, Salamon, Edwin Evans, Nate Soares and Blake Borgeson among its directors and does not list Shlegeris.⁴

Redwood Research

Announcing Redwood on 6 October 2021, Nate Thomas wrote that it was "a longtermist research lab focusing on applied AI alignment," that "We're led by Nate Thomas (CEO), Buck Shlegeris (CTO), and Bill Zito (COO/software engineer)," and that "our board is Nate, Paul Christiano and Holden Karnofsky," with ten staff.⁵ Karnofsky was co-chief executive of Open Philanthropy. In November 2021 Open Philanthropy recommended "four grants totaling $9,420,000 to Redwood Research for general support," with Nick Beckstead as grant investigator; the page states that "Redwood Research staff also reviewed this page prior to publication."⁶

Redwood Research Group Inc (EIN 87-1702255) received its tax exemption on 1 September 2021 and files in care of Nathaniel Thomas at 2150 Shattuck Avenue, Suite 1200, Berkeley. Its return for 2021 lists Karnofsky as treasurer and Christiano as secretary, both unpaid, and Thomas, Michael Shlegeris (chief technology officer) and William Zito each paid 56,250 dollars. For 2022 Shlegeris, still chief technology officer, was paid 273,567 dollars. The return for 2023 lists him first, as chief executive and director, paid 272,175 dollars, with Thomas as board chair, Christiano and Karnofsky as directors until June and November 2023, and Ajeya Cotra as a director. The return for 2024 lists Shlegeris as chief executive and director at 272,164 dollars, Cotra as a director until August 2024 and Ammon Bartram as a director.¹

Redwood reported revenue of 13,904,248 dollars for 2021, 12,049,894 dollars for 2022 and 10,036,347 dollars for 2023, nearly all from contributions, against expenses of 2,341,569, 12,759,191 and 12,590,834 dollars. Its return for 2024 reports contributions of 9,659 dollars, total revenue of 22,060 dollars and expenses of 2,922,498 dollars, including grants of 679,955 dollars.¹⁷

In 2023 a pseudonymous author signing as "Omega." published a critique of Redwood on LessWrong and the Effective Altruism Forum. It stated that Redwood had received 20 million dollars from Open Philanthropy and 1.27 million dollars from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, had been "granted (but never received) $6.6 million from FTX Future Fund," and ran the Constellation office of about 30,000 square feet in Berkeley, where "many OP staff work," adding that "OP pays Redwood for use of the space." Of Shlegeris it wrote that he "has 3 years of software engineering experience and a limited ML research background" and "also worked as a researcher at MIRI for two years."⁸

Alignment Research Center

The team page of the Alignment Research Center (ARC), led by Christiano, names its board as "Paul Christiano, Buck Shlegeris, and Ben Hoskin."⁹