I'm joining METR to work on more investigations like our Hugging Face report. Currently, tons of even basic information about AI development that's highly relevant to catastrophic risk isn't public. I used to be more skeptical of the value of public info, but recent events have changed my mind. Getting verified information about what's going on inside AI companies seems particularly urgent now. The limited public evidence we have seems consistent with the possibility that imminent recursive self-improvement could massively accelerate capabilities progress, which could then potentially yield extremely superhuman general capabilities within 6 months or a year. If this occurred, there would be a correspondingly large risk of worst-case outcomes. This uncertainty about extreme outcomes could be substantially resolved with more verified public information: we could either build more consensus about near-term risk or learn that such extreme outcomes are less likely in the near term. Beyond AI capabilities and takeoff, the state of public evidence is also highly limited for alignment, security, control, and risk-relevant internal processes at AI companies. This makes it hard to determine exactly how well or poorly these key areas will go in the near future. (METR plans to focus, at least initially, on just capabilities/takeoff, alignment, and control; I hope other groups cover security, internal processes, and other important areas.) While I'm no longer working at Redwood, I think the work they are doing is very important; I'm excited about Redwood's ongoing contributions to R&D on technical mitigations and better public interpretation of risk-relevant evidence.