Nate Thomas

Nathaniel "Nate" Thomas is a machine-learning researcher who cofounded Redwood Research, the Berkeley, California AI-alignment nonprofit, in 2021 and served as its chief executive and later its board chair.¹² Redwood's filings with the Internal Revenue Service are made in care of Nathaniel Thomas at 2150 Shattuck Avenue, Suite 1200, Berkeley.²

Stanford

Thomas was the lead author, with Tess Smidt of the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and five researchers from Google in Mountain View (Steven Kearnes, Lusann Yang, Li Li, Kai Kohlhoff and Patrick Riley), of "Tensor field networks: Rotation- and translation-equivariant neural networks for 3D point clouds," posted in February 2018. The paper gives his affiliation as Stanford University.³ In April 2023 the pseudonymous authors of a LessWrong critique of Redwood, signed "Omega.", wrote that "CEO Nate Thomas has a Physics PhD and published some papers on ML during his PhD."⁴

Redwood Research

Announcing the organization on October 6, 2021, Thomas wrote: "Redwood Research is a longtermist research lab focusing on applied AI alignment. We're led by Nate Thomas (CEO), Buck Shlegeris (CTO), and Bill Zito (COO/software engineer); our board is Nate, Paul Christiano and Holden Karnofsky. We currently have ten people on staff."¹ Karnofsky was then co-chief executive of Open Philanthropy, which recommended "four grants totaling $9,420,000 to Redwood Research for general support" in November 2021, with Nick Beckstead as grant investigator, and gave Redwood 62.52 million dollars in all by the end of 2025.⁵⁶

On Redwood's return for 2021 Thomas was chief executive and president and was paid 56,250 dollars, the same as Shlegeris and Zito, with Karnofsky as unpaid treasurer and Christiano as unpaid secretary. For 2022 he was chairperson and president, paid 274,361 dollars. The return for 2023 listed him as director and board chair, Shlegeris as chief executive, and Open Philanthropy's senior program officer for AI risk, Ajeya Cotra, as a director.² The "Omega." critique stated: "Two of Redwood's leadership team have or have had relationships to an OP grant maker. A Redwood board member is married to a different OP grantmaker. A co-CEO of OP is one of the other three board members of Redwood."⁴

Constellation

The same critique described Constellation as an office of about 30,000 square feet run by Redwood, "hosting staff from several technical AI safety focused and longtermist EA-aligned organizations such as OP, ARC, the Atlas Fellowship, CEA and OpenAI," and stated that "OP pays Redwood for use of the space."⁴ The Constellation Institute, EIN 93-2465256, a 501(c)(3) filing from Redwood's Shattuck Avenue address, listed Thomas as chief executive on its return for 2023, when it paid him 91,091 dollars while Redwood paid him 183,333 dollars, each reporting the other's payment as related-organization compensation. Its return for 2024 listed him as chief executive "thru 7/24."²⁷