Samuel J. Bell

I’m Sam 👋, a Member of Technical Staff at Slingshot AI, where I work on AI for mental health. I split my time between London and Cambridge, UK.

My research is broadly focused on evaluating and improving advanced capabilities of LLMs. I’m particularly interested in post-training methods for eliciting complex behaviours such as reasoning about uncertainty or adapting to subjective user preferences, often with an emphasis on scalability through the use of synthetic data. A consistent theme throughout my work is LLM reliability, including understanding model behaviour in novel or out-of-distribution scenarios.

Previously, I was a Research Scientist at FAIR, Meta’s fundamental AI research lab, which I joined in 2023 after a postdoc with FAIR Paris. In 2022, I completed my PhD in machine learning as part of the ML@CL group at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Prof. Neil Lawrence. I have also studied at The Alan Turing Institute, obtained a master’s in natural language processing at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and completed my bachelor’s in computer science at the University of Manchester.

In between, I’ve simulated financial crises in market risk at Goldman Sachs, built new retail banks at Thought Machine, and developed next generation credit scores at Credit Kudos.

If you’re interested in learning more about what I do, or discussing research collaborations or opportunities, please do drop me a line. My email is samueljamesbell [at] gmail [dot] com. I’d love to hear from you.