2026 New Year Resolution

As we arrive at the final few days of 2025, I want to share three main things I aim to achieve in 2026, along with some general plans for them. Why am I writing general plans instead of detailed ones following the SMART principle? I don’t know—maybe I am just lazy. Let’s just call this "Vibe Planning."

So, here we go:

I want to achieve something great in my field: frontier safety risk mitigation. I am genuinely worried about the current level of safety protection—jailbreak robustness, dual-use, account-level actions, open-source model safety, misaligned AI, etc. We need stronger guarantees and more breakthroughs in terms of in-model training, out-of-model protection, and governance.

To achieve this, I will

1. Get necessary things done, rather than focusing on "nice-to-haves." Often, I find myself spending way too much time getting a few percentage points of improvement on certain metrics without actually exploring other major directions. This might be a different form of procrastination—focusing on the local minima (the weeds) instead of making the effort to jump out of my comfort zone.

2. Collaborate more with other labs and AI safety organizations. For good safety coverage, we need every party to uphold the standard. If only one party does safety well, malicious users can easily switch model providers. Good coverage will become increasingly relevant as model capabilities continue to improve and the gap between closed- and open-source models shrinks. To foster collaboration, I will join more AI safety discussions, share relevant techniques and datasets publicly, and publish more often.

To achieve great goals, I need better leadership skills to influence a larger group of people to work together effectively. I want to focus mainly on two aspects of leadership: communication and strategic thinking.

Communication
I want to express myself clearly and effectively.

• For clarity: I want my words to contain all relevant information and be easy for the listener to understand. Currently, I often find myself describing too many technical details without highlighting the most important parts. Sometimes I also forget to describe certain results, causing an information asymmetry.

  • Action: I will gauge what listeners need to hear, write more often to hone my skills, and read relevant books like Crucial Conversations.

• For effectiveness: I want to make the other side more willing to take action. This means gauging the other side’s interest and taking both logical and psychological effects into consideration. Currently, I sometimes fail to understand the constraints of the other side, which makes my proposals harder to accept. I can also be too straightforward, ignoring the nuance of words; even when I am right, my delivery might annoy the other person, making them unwilling to act.

  • Action: I will spend more time on wording before sending messages (likely with help from LLMs), observe the preferred communication styles of others, and ask more questions to understand needs before acting.

Strategic Thinking
I want to think further ahead and prioritize better. If something will eventually be done anyway or become irrelevant after the next quarter, we should deprioritize it. In contrast, we should prepare better for the high-impact things in the future.

To achieve strategic thinking, I will:

• Arrange more discussions with people working in AI safety.

• Spend more time thinking rather than just doing.

• Consolidate those thoughts into words to improve my influence.

• Read and attend more strategic thinking relevant training.

I want to get ~8 hours of sleep every day and climb 5.13 (lead/sport) this year. Currently, my sleep and exercise are suboptimal, mostly due to a lack of boundaries and neglect of my health.

To achieve more balance, I will

• Be more disciplined about my sleep schedule. Instead of staying up late to get things done for colleagues in NYC and the UK, I will set a proper workload and finish tasks early. If I cannot finish the work, I will leave a note for my colleagues rather than sacrificing sleep.

• Be more conscious about my mind and body. Instead of diving back into work soon after waking up, I will do proper stretches and journal to fully awaken my body and mind.

• Be more disciplined about my exercise schedule. Instead of skipping exercise sessions around 4:30 PM, I will block my calendar ahead of time and set an actionable, trackable exercise plan to keep myself motivated to go to the gym.

What are your thoughts on my "vibe planning"? I’d love to hear any suggestions you might have regarding my goals. I hope this resonates with you or that you find this post helpful for our amazing 2026 ahead!

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Acknowledge: Thank you Carey and Qian for giving valuable feedbacks to this post.