Dan Hendrycks: evaluation

Transcript context

…So Dan, your work spans alignments and benchmarks and governance. And I guess it's actually fairly diverse threads. What is the thing in your mind that connects all of these activities together? Well, I'll deliberately try to move into different areas on a continual basis just because that's what's more interesting. So I initially did research. And then there was some amount of corporate policy and things like that when advising or, while advising for for x AI. Then there was a focus on domestic, legislation and then geopolitics. And I think right now is more I'm more interested in political movement related things. So I think it's largely just to keep things interesting. I mean, not solely. It's guided by being useful. But I think that there's often niches that people aren't trying to bring clarity to or advance or think about from the perspective of AI being a very big deal. So that's a reason for continually having or operating at the technical, the corporate policy, the domestic policy, the political and geopolitical levels. I think that that is also necessary for having a holistic understanding of things. You can make proclamations. For instance, you could imagine giving a speech at the UN and saying, we need AI that is safe or transparent or something. And it's like, well, what does that mean? How do you implement that? Is this implementable? What's the standard? And so then you need to have a sense of what's legally feasible at the legislative level? What is actually what is is it what's the compatibility with corporate incentives? Is it going to be something they're going to be fighting too much or not? And then is this actually a real phenomena at the AI level, or is this just some vague word? For instance, like so so there are many, like, words thrown around that don't actually track phenomena or are distinct from, like, general capabilities, for instance, in in machine learning. And then you're not actually pointing to anything real. You're you're just pointing to a vibe of vibe based word. So so 1 thing that you spend a lot of time thinking about is is potential catastrophic risk from AI. And this is a very kind of, emotive and morally valenced, objective. And when I saw you debate with Gary and Daniel the other day, I mean, I was struck by how measured you were, almost measured. And and the stakes are really, really high. And I guess the question is, like, how how driven are you by your moral compass, and how do you keep that under control?…

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