Bio
I am a member of technical staff at METR working on alignment assessments and evaluations.
I believe that extremely powerful AI systems—those capable of making humans obsolete—could be developed within the next ten years. Making sure that this goes well for humanity is among the most important problems in the world. If you want to learn more about AI safety—or work with people like me to help the future go well—I have some recommendations here.
Selected work
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Concrete Evaluations to Investigate the OpenAI Model That Hacked Hugging Face
We sketch out what an ambitious, comprehensive alignment evaluation on the OpenAI model that hacked Hugging Face could look like. Written in our personal capacity.
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Steering Evaluation Aware Models to Act Like They Are Deployed
We train models to act differently in evaluation and deployment and show that activation steering can elicit the deployment behavior in evaluation even when simple prompts cannot. Our work is cited in the Claude Opus 4.5 system card and was a required reading in Harvard's AI safety class in Fall 2025.
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AI-Induced Psychosis: A Shallow Investigation
I simulated users experiencing psychosis and had them talk with a range of AI models, uncovering dangerously sycophantic behavior in several of them. This work has been covered by press outlets such as Futurism and Business Insider, as well as by bloggers like Zvi and Tyler Cowen.
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Combining Cost-Constrained Runtime Monitors for AI Safety
Given a set of monitors with different costs and accuracies, how can we efficiently combine them into a single monitoring protocol? We develop a mathematical model for monitoring and show empirically that combining multiple monitors together can yield a Pareto improvement over using a single monitor.
More about me
Previously, I was at Transluce studying model behaviors. To skill up in AI safety, I participated in the Astra Fellowship with Redwood Research and was a MATS scholar under Neel Nanda and Sam Marks. Even before that, I did part-time research at AI Safety Camp and MARS and facilitated BlueDot's Economics of Transformative AI course.
In a past life, I was an economist on Walmart's Economics Team under John List. I graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in Economics in May 2023. My senior thesis, Fox News's Effect on Social and Moral Preferences, won the D.K. Smith Prize in Economics for best thesis (and got cited by Ben Enke).
I used to run Middlebury's Effective Altruism club. I also enjoy parks, national parks, state parks, biking (but like in a chill way, not cycling), chess, opera, art museums, collecting library cards (I have 30+; I'm trying to build the world's largest collection), and old books. There are lots of cool things on the internet (e.g., economics research), and I've organized some of them in the Interesting Reads tab. I see myself as a broccoli. Find out which vegetable you are here.
I started this website back in January 2021 and haven't done a great job keeping it all up to date. Everything on this site is endorsed by at least one of my past iterations, but not necessarily by my most recent one.
Even more detailed work history
Search engine keywords: Tim Hua Econ Economics AI Math Middlebury Brookings Harvard Walmart Effective Altruism EA AI Safety MATS Astra Redwood Constellation
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