BlueDot Stories

In this episode, Dewi speaks with Ashyana, an AI ethics and safety manager at Google DeepMind, who took one of the most unconventional paths into frontier AI safety — a politics degree, 700 job rejections, and a research project with 90 women across the world that revealed digital harms hiding in plain sight. Ashyana shares how a pre-LSE research project reframed her entire career, what it was like working inside OpenAI on red-teaming GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, and the moment she decided to walk awa...

In this episode, Dewi speaks with Daniel and Luca, two quantitative analysts who left Bank of America to build Exona Labs — a startup helping insurance companies price AI risks. Daniel shares his path from applied maths in Hungary through finance to AI safety, while Luca talks about measuring the Higgs boson at CERN before pivoting to the corporate world. They explain the moment AI coding assistants made them realize this technology was genuinely transformative, the historical parallel of ste...

In this episode, Dewi speaks with Ryan Kidd, an Australian quantum physicist who pivoted from academia to become co-executive director of MATS (ML Alignment & Theory Scholars), one of the field's most ambitious AI safety talent pipelines. Ryan shares his journey from Brisbane to Berkeley—through depression, long COVID, and a PhD he almost didn't finish—and how discovering effective altruism during his doctorate redirected his career entirely. He talks about the turning point when ...

In this episode, Dewi speaks with David Conrad, an Australian entrepreneur who went from running a nationwide chain of premium pet resorts to helping build Europe’s AI policy talent pipeline. David shares how burnout, the pandemic, and a growing sense of responsibility pulled him away from the startup world and toward the fast-moving landscape of AI governance. He talks through the uncertainty of entering a new field, the challenge of finding meaningful work in AI policy without a technical ...

Conversations with the people shaping the future of AI. In this episode, Dewi sits down with Kris Bar, a former quantum computer scientist who later worked in the UK government on the Online Safety Act before moving into more direct AI Safety work. Kris talks through how he first encountered the deeper risks posed by advanced AI systems, why he felt the policy world wasn’t engaging with those risks quickly enough, and what ultimately pushed him to shift his career toward areas where he could...