Join Nathan for an expansive conversation with Dan Hendrycks, Executive Director of the Center for AI Safety and Advisor to Elon Musk's XAI. In this episode of The Cognitive Revolution, we explore Dan's groundbreaking work in AI safety and alignment, from his early contributions to activation functions to his recent projects on AI robustness and governance. Discover insights on representation engineering, circuit breakers, and tamper-resistant training, as well as Dan's perspectives on AI's impact on society and the future of intelligence. Don't miss this in-depth discussion with one of the most influential figures in AI research and safety.

Check out some of Dan's research papers:

MMLU: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03300

GELU: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.08415

Machiavelli Benchmark: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03279

Circuit Breakers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04313

Tamper Resistant Safeguards: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00761

Statement on AI Risk: https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk

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CHAPTERS:

(00:00:00) Teaser

(00:00:48) About the Show

(00:02:17) About the Episode

(00:05:41) Intro

(00:07:19) GELU Activation Function

(00:10:48) Signal Filtering

(00:12:46) Scaling Maximalism

(00:18:35) Sponsors: Shopify | LMNT

(00:22:03) New Architectures

(00:25:41) AI as Complex System

(00:32:35) The Machiavelli Benchmark

(00:34:10) Sponsors: Notion | Oracle

(00:37:20) Understanding MMLU Scores

(00:45:23) Reasoning in Language Models

(00:49:18) Multimodal Reasoning

(00:54:53) World Modeling and Sora

(00:57:07) Arc Benchmark and Hypothesis

(01:01:06) Humanity's Last Exam

(01:08:46) Benchmarks and AI Ethics

(01:13:28) Robustness and Jailbreaking

(01:18:36) Representation Engineering

(01:30:08) Convergence of Approaches

(01:34:18) Circuit Breakers

(01:37:52) Tamper Resistance

(01:49:10) Interpretability vs. Robustness

(01:53:53) Open Source and AI Safety

(01:58:16) Computational Irreducibility

(02:06:28) Neglected Approaches

(02:12:47) Truth Maxing and XAI

(02:19:59) AI-Powered Forecasting

(02:24:53) Chip Bans and Geopolitics

(02:33:30) Working at CAIS

(02:35:03) Extinction Risk Statement

(02:37:24) Outro