Adam Shai

Co-Founder, Simplex; Co-lead, Astera

  • Adam Shai has extensive research experience in experimental and computational neuroscience. He earned his PhD from Caltech and has over a decade of experience investigating the neural basis of intelligent behavior, most recently as a researcher at Stanford. Driven by the pressing need for AI safety, he has now turned his expertise to neural networks, aiming to develop principled methods for controlling and aligning increasingly advanced AI systems.

    Adam co-founded and now leads research at Simplex, an organization dedicated to building a science of representations in AI systems.

  • Work in this stream will build on our discovery of belief-state geometry in the activations of pretrained neural networks. The project can leverage applicants’ strengths in mathematical modeling and/or ML engineering. We welcome highly driven and relatively autonomous researchers that would like to benefit from our mentorship while taking the lead on a relevant project of their choice. Some possible projects can study in-context learning, out of distribution generalization, theoretically benchmarking SAEs, designing new methods for finding features and geometric structure, methods of compressing representations in transformers, interpretability on RL models, extending theory to multiagent settings. We are also open to other projects that extend more into personas and model psychology.

  • The project can leverage applicants’ strengths in mathematical modeling and/or ML engineering. We welcome highly driven and relatively autonomous researchers that would like to benefit from our mentorship while taking the lead on a relevant project of their choice. The ideal scholar has the ability to move fast, and has experience in either research (e.g., PhD in any field), or software/ML engineering. We highly value the ever elusive research taste!