Hi, I'm Akash. I do AI safety research, and I like building things.
I just finished my CS undergrad. Right now I'm a research fellow at the Cooperative AI Research Fellowship in Cape Town, working on multi-agent systems. I'm still figuring a lot of it out. These are the papers and the projects so far.
A few things I've done
- Research DarkBench A benchmark for the manipulative patterns hiding inside language models. The moves models learn to deploy on the people who use them.
- Research Do LLMs Take Care of Their Own? Evidence that a model treats other agents differently when it can tell they're like itself, and that this alone is enough to induce cooperation.
- Civic tech Kolkata Travel Router Route info for Kolkata's buses and metro lives in people's heads and fragmented lists. This turns it into a searchable graph. Direct, one-change, and two-change journeys, autocomplete, stop maps. Static, no backend, no login.
- Documentary Trying to Become Human Again A short video I post most days, about the research, seeing people, and not losing the rest of life to the work.
Now and not yet
Right now
Wrapping up the research fellowship through August, looking at similarity between agents and whether that makes them cooperate. Also, impulsively building out ideas that occur to me at 2 AM. Trying to figure out where I go after this; probably a PhD.
Stuff I haven't done yet
Writing. I keep saying I'll start, but I haven't. Credit where it's due: I did finally make this site. I've got a pile of half-finished ideas lying around, and I still don't really know how to keep a project alive after the week it goes viral. I never planned how to scale it. Still learning.