Day: September 17, 2025

• Neel Nanda, 26, leads the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind.
• He said he got into leadership by breaking his perfectionist streak and saying yes to opportunities.
• “One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that you can just do things,” he added.

Neel Nanda did not expect to be leading a team at Google DeepMind at the age of 26.

A self-described perfectionist, the lead for Google DeepMind’s mechanistic interpretability team said he often hesitates before starting projects, afraid they might flop.

“I often don’t want to do things. I’m like, ‘This seems risky. This could go wrong,'” Nanda said on an episode of “The 80,000 Hours Podcast” published Tuesday.

To break that perfectionist streak, the senior research scientist said he challenged himself to write one blog post a day for a month.

Nanda said this routine helped him build visibility in the AI community, produce work that shaped the field of mechanistic interpretability, and even meet his partner.

“One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that you can just do things,” he said. He sees it as part of “maximizing your luck surface area,” saying yes more often and giving luck more chances to show up.

Sometimes that meant doing “things that are kind of a bit weird or unusual,” like posting a three-hour unedited YouTube video of himself reading through a dense AI paper, he said.

It ended up drawing more than 30,000 views.

That same mindset led him into leadership. When Nanda joined DeepMind in 2023, he expected to be an individual researcher, he said. But a few months in, the team’s leader stepped down — and Nanda agreed to take over.

“I did not know if I was going to be good at this,” he said.

“To me, this is both an example of the importance of having luck surface area — being in a situation where opportunities like that can arise — but also that you should just say yes to things, even if they seem kind of scary,” he added.

Nanda did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

By Phil Noble WINDSOR, England (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump formally begins his unprecedented second state visit to Britain on Wednesday with the royal pomp a grand veneer to key diplomatic talks, and as difficult questions about Jeffrey Epstein linger. King Charles and the royal family will roll out the red carpet for the president when he arrives at Windsor Castle, the oldest and

• The former BLS commissioner warned of political meddling in economic data collection.
• Erika McEntarfer’s ousting followed a jobs report showing 250,000 fewer jobs were added than expected.
• Economists fear that firing the BLS head harms US economic data integrity and public trust.

Erika McEntarfer, the former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, raised the alarm on political meddling in economic data collection.

“Economic data must be free from partisan influence,” McEntarfer said in her first public remarks since her sudden ousting by President Donald Trump last month. McEntarfer made the comments at an event on Tuesday at her alma mater, Bard College.

She compared BLS data to “traffic lights” and said that any manipulation of these reports could hurt people. This is because policymakers, investors, and businesses depend on this data to make decisions.

“Markets have to trust the data are not manipulated,” McEntarfer said. “Firing your chief statisticians for releasing data you do not like, it has serious economic consequences.”

“The list of countries that have gone down this route, it’s not a good list,” she said.

She added that steep and persistent cuts to the agency’s staff and budget made it harder to track the labor market and overall economic growth.

Last month, Trump fired McEntarfer following a disappointing jobs report. Trump said that the report, which showed the US had added about 250,000 fewer jobs than expected, had been manipulated to hurt him politically. BLS often revises its jobs reports.

“We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post at the time. “Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”

McEntarfer was appointed to the BLS in January 2024 by former President Joe Biden and confirmed by a bipartisan Senate vote.

Economists warned that Trump firing McEntarfer and raising doubts about BLS data could have poor consequences.

“Firing the head of the BLS is five-alarm intentional harm to the integrity of US economic data and the entire statistical system,” Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former Undersecretary for Economic Affairs at the US Department of Commerce, wrote on X.

William Beach, a Trump-appointed former BLS commissioner, also condemned McEntarfer’s firing. He called his successor’s firing “a dangerous precedent.”

Last month, Trump nominated E.J. Antoni, a conservative economist at the Heritage Foundation, to serve as the next BLS commissioner. Antoni, whose appointment requires Senate confirmation, has previously been critical of the BLS and its reports. Antoni has no government experience.