Hi, I'm Mrinal

I'm a Machine Learning Engineer passionate about building elegant solutions to complex problems. My interests span across foundational models and its safety alignment.

When I'm not coding, you'll find me reading research papers, experimenting with new technologies, or contributing to open source projects. This blog is my public notebook a place to document what I'm learning, share hard-won insights, and occasionally rant about transformer architectures.

I occasionally mentor students navigating their first steps in ML or early career decisions in tech, it's my way of giving back to the communities I come from. If you're part of the UC or IIT system and want to chat about machine learning, research, or breaking into the industry, feel free to reach out at mrinal.anand07@gmail.com.

I spend a lot of time thinking about AI in 2050 and what super-alignment actually means when we're trying to align superintelligent systems with "human values." The problem is that human history isn't exactly a moral success story. It's a few thousand years of survival instincts, resource competition, and self-preservation dressed up as civilization. If we're aligning AI to human behavior patterns, we might be encoding the wrong things entirely.

I don't think alignment in the traditional sense scales to superintelligence. Teaching models to mimic human preferences through RLHF or constitutional AI feels like a band-aid on systems that are already learning from fundamentally misaligned data. We might need to stop treating AI as something that should think like us and accept it as a different form of intelligence altogether. The key might be embedding core values before the system ever touches knowledge. Think of it as building the ethical foundation first, then letting the intelligence form around it, rather than trying to course-correct after training.

This is speculative, and I'm not claiming to have answers. But if you're working on safety and alignment research, have strong counterarguments to this framing, or just want to debate whether any of this is even possible, I'd genuinely love to hear from you.