About Gretta

I like to…

  • Tinker with and figure out complex systems that don’t work quite right. Then I tweak them — or completely rearrange their guts — and make them better.

  • Optimize everything.

  • Make good deals.

  • Investigate, understand, and teach.

My dominant MtG colors are blue and black.

Brief Résumé

  • Right now: I’m doing independent technical alignment research.

  • I ran the Communications department at MIRI (the Machine Intelligence Research Institute) for half of 2023 and most of 2024. I scaled it up from one person to six and helped execute some of the trickiest parts of MIRI’s pivot from technical alignment research to focusing on comms and policy. After that I spent about a year supporting Eliezer Yudkowsky through the launch of his NYT bestselling book about AI ruin.

  • In 2019, I founded a small psychotherapy practice where I was the head therapist and I managed a few others. I specialized in relationship and sex therapy and especially in high-conflict couples therapy.

  • I led a few different teams at Google between 2007 and 2015.

    • I co-managed the Analytics site reliability engineering (SRE) team for a while. We ran massive backend processing pipelines, a complex frontend interface, and the highest queries-per-second (qps) service at Google at that time. We completely rearchitected the backend to run continuously and consistently across multiple data centers with smooth failover and executed a flawless migration to the new system. Meanwhile we kept that very high qps service at five nines of uptime over multiple years. Still proud of that.

    • Later, I owned map data quality for Google Maps. It was literally my job to make sure the map matched the territory as much as possible. This job required as much people engineering as software engineering. By the time I left Google I was running five engineering teams across three Google sites and two continents.

You can see a more comprehensive recounting of my career on LinkedIn.

I have four cherished partners. In order of acquisition:

  • Duncan Sabien. I first met Duncan at a CFAR workshop in 2015, though it was several more years before we partnered up. Duncan attracted me by being loudly himself on the internet, and I’m forever grateful to him for being upstream of most of the rest of my current life.

  • Eliezer Yudkowsky. We met at Duncan’s wedding to Eliezer’s ex-spouse, and we are definitely not married. We go to a lot of escape rooms. Our two most popular joint projects so far have been prodigal sorceress and HPMOR: the (Probably) Untold Lore.

  • Shoshannah Tekofsky, whom I met because we were both dating Eliezer. Shoshannah is usually trying twenty crazy things at once to find one that works, and I’m glad to be one that worked. We run a discord server together.

  • John Wentworth, who got my attention by radiating Dark Lord energy while actually trying to save the world. He’s ruthlessly excellent.

All of my partners are (1) picky and (2) open to new liaisons with the right people, and I love to make that happen for them. Please inquire if you’d like to audition for a spot on their dance cards.

I also have three children with three distinctly different personalities. It makes me wonder how many children I’d need to have before I got a repeat, but I’m not going to try it to find out.