Ariel Gil - Professional Headshot

Ariel Gil

AI Safety Researcher

Co-Lead at AI Standards Lab

About Me

I am an AI Governance and Safety Researcher working on EU AI Act Risk Management Standards. I co-lead the AI Standards Lab, a 501(c)(3) which I co-founded in late 2023.

Originally a Mechatronics Engineer, I was an early team member an ophthalmic semi-autonomous surgical robotics startup, as well as in ML-based ultrasound diagnostics. My AI governance work is informed by my Risk Management experience, as well as technical and conceptual AI safety knowledge I've picked up along the way. Currently, I am exploring governance in shorter timelines and how I can best contribute to that space.

In my free time, I mountain bike, rock climb, and dance salsa (when I'm not injured!). I also do occasional small design projects and 3D printing. You can see some of my previous engineering projects in my design portfolio.

Current Projects

AI Standards Lab

Co-leading a nonprofit focused on supporting the development of standards and risk management frameworks for AI systems. We aim to bridge technical research with practical implementation work (translating research into a format suited for standards bodies). So far, we have focused on CEN-CENELEC JTC21 standards for the "High-Risk" systems in the AI Act, as well as the Codes of Practice.

Discernment/Scalable oversight

I am writing a paper exploring what can be called the "discernment problem" - scalable oversight failures specifically when using AI systems to automate AI safety research. I think that there's a chance we will hit this bottleneck soon, and it might make iterative alignment strategies less likely to work. I am trying to take different angles to it from the governance side - maybe as a policy brief, or maybe to give a better sense of the issue and what we can do about it. See my governance preprint and my technical research proposal which I am working on in parallel.

Short Timelines Thinking

I am starting to look into governance for shorter timelines. In my EU standards work, it was hard to zoom out and think big picture, as it felt a bit irrelevant for the day-to-day work of implementing the AI Act (e.g. in the Codes of Practice and JTC21 standards). Now I am starting to zoom out, and see what I can do in this space.

Selected Publications and working papers