Joel Becker

Regrantor

Bio

Updated 05/21/26

Member of Technical Staff at METR. A nonprofit that scientifically evaluates whether and when AI systems might pose catastrophic risks. He holds a BSc in Economics and Econometrics from the University of Bristol (2014–2018) and was a PhD student in Economics at New York University (2020–2023), where his research focused on forecasting and pandemic resilience. During his graduate studies he co-organized SHELTER Weekend (Oxford, August 2022), a strategic event aimed at building civilizational refuges to address existential risks, and received LTFF funding to pursue civilizational resilience projects stemming from that work. At METR he works on AI evaluation methods including time-horizon benchmarks and randomized controlled trials measuring AI's impact on developer productivity — his RCT of expert developers on major open-source projects showed that AI tools led to a 19% slowdown despite developers believing they were faster. He also co-authored research forecasting capability gains from post-training enhancements. Outside his primary work he is Founder/CEO of Qally's, a regrantor on Manifund, and was formerly one of the most profitable forecasters on Manifold Markets.