Former ML Engineer Samuel Verboomen: Show Friends What AI Can Do First, Then Talk About Risks
Samuel Verboomen spent nearly a decade in machine learning before transitioning to AI safety. He found that the core problem for non-technical people is not a lack of information but a mental picture of AI capabilities still stuck in 2022. He designed a two-hour interactive presentation that uses a capability showcase as bait, progressively introducing risk discussion across five parts, and validated a key design choice at his first session with six friends: letting attendees first operate a nearly useless base model, then switch to an assistant model — the contrast made 'what predicting the next word can achieve' very concrete.
ImportanceMaterialEvidenceE3 inspectableWrite-upStandard
Samuel Verboomen worked as a machine learning engineer for almost ten years, holding a CTO role at startups. Six months ago he quit to transition into AI safety and launched his own non-profit. But the LessWrong post he wrote is not really about his own journey; it is about a problem he has repeatedly observed over the past half year: people outside the AI field are not indifferent to AI — they simply do not know what AI can already do.
Chatting with his stepmother, he noticed that for her AI is still basically a chatbot: you ask it a question, copy-paste the answer, and use it to draft an email. He cites US polls showing many people say they are worried about AI, but in his experience few understand why it could actually be dangerous. That cognitive gap led him to conclude that talking about risks directly is ineffective: it is hard to make someone fear something they do not yet grasp.
So he designed a two-hour interactive presentation structured in five parts: first show what AI can already do today, then cover AI history and how it works, then introduce who is building these systems and why nobody is willing to slow down, then move into risks — starting with the easiest to understand, misuse, through systemic effects, and ending with what sounds most like science fiction: loss of control. His own words were 'I wanted to trick my non-tech friends into learning about AI safety' — inviting them to learn 'how to use AI better,' but the real goal was to progressively bring them face to face with the risks.