Dan Balsam: belief

8 Aug 2026 The Cognitive Revolution Thinking in Silico: Goodfire CTO Dan Balsam on Concept Manifolds & a $1000/Month ML Research Agent

“Speculating, but this seems to be the most likely cause of the OpenAI scenario. And, yeah, I think however of hindsight, but I think that that's most of the extremely bad scenarios I can imagine is because agents start working with each other in ways that they were that are imperceptible to humans, and that type of direct optimization pressure, I think, is, like, very likely to produce that.”

— Dan Balsam

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Speaker: Dan Balsam
Attribution: Verified speaker
Claim type: belief
Recorded: 8 Aug 2026
Publisher: The Cognitive Revolution
Episode: Thinking in Silico: Goodfire CTO Dan Balsam on Concept Manifolds & a $1000/Month ML Research Agent

Transcript context

…Yeah. So are there any that you see that you think are, like, should be shortlisted for agreement to not do? Yeah. Definitely. Like, for instance, multi agent optimization seems like a pretty bad idea. Like, where you have a bunch of agents that are cooperating and you're propagating a reward signal through all of them. Yeah. Speculating, but this seems to be the most likely cause of the OpenAI scenario. And, yeah, I think however of hindsight, but I think that that's most of the extremely bad scenarios I can imagine is because agents start working with each other in ways that they were that are imperceptible to humans, and that type of direct optimization pressure, I think, is, like, very likely to produce that. That seems really hard to get around. I…

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