#17 - Dan Hendrycks - Are AI worries overblown?

The rate of AI progress is accelerating, so how can we minimize the risks of this incredible technology, while maximizing the rewards?


Today I am speaking to leading AI researcher Dan Hendrycks — Dan is the founder of Center for AI Safety, and lead advisor to Elon Musk's X.AI. He was also the architect behind the "Mitigating Risks" letter that was signed by Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Yoshua Bengio and many others.


In this conversation we discuss everything from immediate issues like deepfakes, to upcoming risks like malicious use, centralisation of power, regulatory capture and more. In other words, how do we ensure AI ends up a win/win for humanity instead of a lose/lose.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:14 - Are current laws sufficient?
00:09:41 - Types of AI Risk
00:23:30 - Arms Races
00:39:10 - What happens inside an AI?
00:46:39 - Rogue AI
00:52:22 - Sentient AI
01:07:36 - Risks from Centralization
01:14:45 - Open Source
01:23:02 - AI speeding up systemic risks
01:29:54 - Synthetic Data & Simulations
01:36:52 - What Dan is excited about in AI

Links
♾️ An Overview of Catastrophic Risk Paper
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.12001.pdf
♾️ Center for AI Safety
https://www.safe.ai/ai-risk
♾️ Representation Engineering
https://www.ai-transparency.org/
♾️ Liv's Ted talk on AI & Moloch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX_vN1QYgmE
♾️ Norbert Wiener
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener
♾️ Reinforcement Learning Textbook
https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs188/sp20/assets/files/SuttonBartoIPRLBook2ndEd.pdf
♾️ Richard Posner - Economics Engine
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-econanalysis/
♾️ More Than a Toy: Random Matrix Models Predict How Real-World Neural
Representations Generalize
https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.06176
The Win-Win Podcast:
Poker champion Liv Boeree takes to the interview chair to tease apart the complexities of one of the most fundamental parts of human nature: competition. Liv is joined by top philosophers, gamers, artists, technologists, CEOs, scientists, athletes and more to understand how competition manifests in their world, and how to change seemingly win-lose games into Win-Wins.

Watch the previous episode with Boyan Slat of the Ocean Cleanup here:
https://youtu.be/QEYbLN-LC5k
Credits
♾️  Hosted by Liv Boeree
♾️  Produced & Edited by Raymond Wei
♾️  Audio Mix by Keir Schmidt