Thomas Kwa

Karma: 6,931

Member of technical staff at METR.

Previously: Vivek Hebbar’s team at MIRI → Adrià Garriga-Alonso on various empirical alignment projects → METR.

I have signed no contracts or agreements whose existence I cannot mention.

Claude, GPT, and Gemini All Struggle to Evade Monitors

Vincent Cheng and Thomas Kwa

6 Aug 2025 20:28 UTC

59 points

3 comments5 min readLW link

METR: How Does Time Horizon Vary Across Domains?

Thomas Kwa and Vincent Cheng

14 Jul 2025 16:13 UTC

84 points

7 comments14 min readLW link

(metr.org)

Tsinghua paper: Does RL Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?

Thomas Kwa5 May 2025 18:56 UTC

69 points

21 comments2 min readLW link

(arxiv.org)

Should CA, TX, OK, and LA merge into a giant swing state, just for elections?

Thomas Kwa6 Nov 2024 23:01 UTC

115 points

35 comments1 min readLW link

The murderous shortcut: a toy model of instrumental convergence

Thomas Kwa2 Oct 2024 6:48 UTC

37 points

0 comments2 min readLW link

Goodhart in RL with KL: Appendix

Thomas Kwa18 May 2024 0:40 UTC

12 points

0 comments6 min readLW link

Catastrophic Goodhart in RL with KL penalty

Thomas Kwa and Adrià Garriga-alonso

15 May 2024 0:58 UTC

62 points

10 comments7 min readLW link

[Question] Is a random box of gas predictable after 20 seconds?

Thomas Kwa and habryka

24 Jan 2024 23:00 UTC

38 points

35 comments1 min readLW link

[Question] Will quantum randomness affect the 2028 election?

Thomas Kwa and habryka

24 Jan 2024 22:54 UTC

66 points

52 comments1 min readLW link

Thomas Kwa’s research journal

Thomas Kwa and Adrià Garriga-alonso

23 Nov 2023 5:11 UTC

79 points

1 comment6 min readLW link

Thomas Kwa’s MIRI research experience

Thomas Kwa, peterbarnett, Vivek Hebbar, Jeremy Gillen, Bird Concept and Raemon

2 Oct 2023 16:42 UTC

174 points

53 comments1 min readLW link

Catastrophic Regressional Goodhart: Appendix

Thomas Kwa and Drake Thomas

15 May 2023 0:10 UTC

25 points

1 comment9 min readLW link

When is Goodhart catastrophic?

Drake Thomas and Thomas Kwa

9 May 2023 3:59 UTC

180 points

30 comments8 min readLW link 1 review

Challenge: construct a Gradient Hacker

Thomas Larsen and Thomas Kwa

9 Mar 2023 2:38 UTC

39 points

10 comments1 min readLW link

Failure modes in a shard theory alignment plan

Thomas Kwa27 Sep 2022 22:34 UTC

26 points

2 comments7 min readLW link

Utility functions and probabilities are entangled

Thomas Kwa26 Jul 2022 5:36 UTC

15 points

5 comments1 min readLW link

Deriving Conditional Expected Utility from Pareto-Efficient Decisions

Thomas Kwa5 May 2022 3:21 UTC

24 points

1 comment6 min readLW link

Most problems don’t differ dramatically in tractability (under certain assumptions)

Thomas Kwa4 May 2022 0:05 UTC

8 points

0 comments3 min readLW link

The case for turning glowfic into Sequences

Thomas Kwa27 Apr 2022 6:58 UTC

88 points

29 comments5 min readLW link

[Question] (When) do high-dimensional spaces have linear paths down to local minima?

Thomas Kwa22 Apr 2022 15:35 UTC

12 points

7 comments1 min readLW link