Todor Markov
Member of Technical Staff, OpenAI
Email: todor@openai.com
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Bio

Core values and beliefs

I care deeply about advancing freedom, both for myself and for others. To me, that means:
On a more concrete level, I want to see progress in the following areas:

I believe that scientific and technological advancements are crucial for creating the kind of progress I describe above (see these two blog posts for some specific arguments behind this position)

My current work (and that of my colleagues) at OpenAI ultimately aims to create human-level artificial intelligence that is aligned with human values, and ensure that the benefits of that technology are distributed broadly across the whole of humanity. I believe that the potential impact of this work is extremely high - if we are successful, that would lead to massive progress in all the areas I describe above. Conversely, if sufficiently powerful AI systems are misused or deployed in an unsafe manner, that could cause massive, potentially irreversible damage.

Personal

I was born and raised in Bulgaria. There, I studied at a gymnasium that focused on mathematics and natural sciences, and I was very active in math contests (culminating in competing at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2012 and 2013).

In my free time, I like spending time with friends, reading, travel and adventure sports.

Writing

The below documents are compressed summaries of my thoughts on a given topic, synthesized via reading a number of books and other resources. Note that they were originally written for my personal use, so they might be missing important implicit context. This could potentially make them difficult to understand for external readers.

Creating, modifying and eliminating habits
Effective learning
Emotions and mental state management
Project management

Publications