Geoffrey Irving

Geoffrey Irving is a computer scientist and AI safety researcher. His work includes research on scalable oversight, AI safety via debate, and early applications of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to large language models. He has worked at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and the United Kingdom's AI Safety Institute, and has been featured on the TIME100 AI list.

Education and career Irving received a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 2007. His dissertation was titled Methods for the Physically Based Simulation of Solids and Fluids.

He has worked at Google Brain, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind. In 2024, he joined the United Kingdom's AI Safety Institute, where he served as a research director and later as chief scientist.

Research Irving's work on scalable oversight includes AI Safety via Debate, a 2018 paper with Paul Christiano and Dario Amodei. The paper proposed using debates between AI systems to help a human judge evaluate answers to difficult questions. The debate approach has been discussed as a method for improving the honesty and oversight of advanced AI systems.