Nicky Pochinkov

Ireland

Bio

Updated 03/22/26

Nicky Pochinkov is an independent AI safety researcher and ML engineer based in Ireland, currently affiliated with Coefficient Giving. He studied theoretical physics at Trinity College Dublin and represented Ireland in both the International Mathematical Olympiad (2018) and the International Chemistry Olympiad. His research focuses on mechanistic interpretability of large language models, including machine unlearning via selective pruning, neuron modularity and specialization in transformers, and decoding residual stream activations to understand planning in LLMs. He is co-author of the paper "Dissecting Language Models: Machine Unlearning via Selective Pruning" (with Nandi Schoots, arXiv 2024). He was a scholar in the SERI MATS program working with Evan Hubinger, has served as a teaching assistant and compute infrastructure lead for the ARENA alignment research training program (versions 5.0 and 6.0), and has served as a guest lecturer for AI Safety Tokyo. He has received multiple grants from the Long-Term Future Fund totaling approximately $200,000 for independent AI safety research.