Alexander Turner

Berkeley, California

Bio

Alexander Matt Turner, known online as TurnTrout, is a research scientist at Google DeepMind on the Scalable Alignment team, based in Berkeley, California. He earned his PhD in computer science from Oregon State University (2016–2022) under advisor Prasad Tadepalli, followed by a postdoc at UC Berkeley's Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI) from 2022 to 2023. His research spans several key areas of AI alignment: he developed Attainable Utility Preservation (AUP), a framework for low-impact AI; proved mathematically that optimal policies tend to seek power, published as a NeurIPS 2021 spotlight paper; co-developed shard theory (with Quintin Pope), a framework modeling AI and human values as situationally activated goal components; and pioneered activation engineering and steering vectors for controlling model behavior at inference time. At Google DeepMind, his current work includes consistency training to reduce sycophancy and jailbreaks in Gemini models. He is also a MATS mentor through his Team Shard program, supporting junior alignment researchers.