Cam Tice

‘I would be very surprised if we don’t look back in five to ten years and people don’t just thank you for making the jump now.’

Cam Tice was a pre-med student, deep in the books and set on becoming a doctor, having spent six years working towards medical school, sacrificing social life, family time, everything, all driven by a desire to reduce suffering.

Then he came across an essay arguing that doctors in the US probably weren’t the best counterfactual use of a talented person’s time, and that one idea sent him down a rabbit hole, first into global health, then into AI safety.

The pivot wasn’t easy, he applied to 18 fellowships and wasn’t accepted to a single one, but he kept going, taught himself Python, entered a hackathon, and three days later he’d won it. From there his career snowballed.

Along the way he met Puria Radmard and Edward Young, and they started small, a couple of project grants and a shared sense that they were onto something, before formalising as Geodesic Research. They did narrow chain-of-thought work for a while but held off committing to a single agenda until something truly excited them, which turned out to be alignment pre-training, a part of AI safety that was largely unowned, and they ran with it, growing into a more formal, better-funded organisation.

(He also completed a psychiatry master’s degree in the last twelve months, no big deal.)

In this video, he talks about his path from pre-med to AI safety, the uncertainty of making a big career pivot, and why he thinks this is one of the most important times to get involved.