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 away from one of the most sought-after jobs in tech. She explains why she held two jobs simultaneously at multiple points in her career, how teaching on Blue Dot's AI governance course reshaped her thinking, and why understanding AI risk requires moving fluently between the technical and the societal.
This conversation digs into what AI safety actually looks like from inside a frontier lab, why a politics degree might be more useful than you think, and how staying relentless, even through hundreds of rejections, can lead somewhere nobody mapped out for you.
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A podcast by BlueDot Impact.