About Me

Hi there! I’m Michael Liu, a software engineer passionate about AI development and safety. I combine practical engineering experience with a deep interest in advancing AI technology in reliable and beneficial ways.

I’m currently seeking roles in AI development. You can view my resume here.

Professional Background

I most recently served as a Software Development Engineer II at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where I was a key member of the Data Transfer Metering team. Our system processed 140 PB of data and $11 million in revenue daily, serving as a critical component of AWS’s infrastructure. During my tenure, I:

Led cross-team initiatives for automating AWS region builds
Implemented storage optimizations resulting in ~600PB/month savings
Maintained 24/7 system reliability through on-call rotations and incident response
Mentored new team members and interns

I hold a BS in Computer Science with a specialization in Machine Learning from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Current Focus

I’m learning about:

LLM Agents
AI Safety, Alignment, and Capabilities
Technological Determinism
Longtermism
Progress Studies

Quotes I’m thinking about

“I think the phrase AGI should be retired and replaced by “human-level AI”. There is no such thing as AGI. Even human intelligence is very specialized. We do not realize that human intelligence is specialized because all the intelligent tasks we can think of are task that we can apprehend. But that is a tiny subset of all tasks.”
— Yann LeCun

“…you’ve just got humans in control of everything and these AI servants doing exactly whatever people want… But as soon as you think maybe, and quite probably, those beings have moral status, that no longer looks like an attractive vision for future society.”
— Will MacAskill

“…it’s really remarkable the extent to which those utopias now look like dystopias… It’s like only a century, which is small in the grand scheme of things. But very often the societies are totalitarian; very often they bake in kind of moral blindspots of the time. Thomas More’s utopia, the person who coined the term, had amazing abundance, this wonderful society in many ways. Every household owned two slaves. Not so appealing nowadays.”
— Will MacAskill