Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety, explains the scope of his benchmark 'Humanity's Last Exam' and what near-ceiling performance will signify.
“When performance is near the ceiling, I think that'd basically be an indication that, like, you have something like a superhuman mathematician or a superhuman STEM scientist for, in many ways, for when they're, when closed-ended questions are very useful, such as in math.”
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More from Dan Hendrycks
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Hendrycks: U.S. and China may launch preemptive cyberattacks on data centers
“I think that later on, it becomes so destabilizing that China just says, we're going to do something preemptive, like do a cyber attack on your data center. And the U.S. Might do that to China.”
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“If you do it voluntarily, you just make yourself less powerful and you let the worst actors get ahead of you. You could say, well, we'll try and try to sign a treaty. We will not assume that the treaty will be followed. Like that would be very imprudent. You w…”
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PredictionNot checkable as stated
Hendrycks: China will steal model weights even if chip controls succeed
“Even so, I still think if you really tighten the export controls, you made it so that China can't get any of those chips at all, and this is your, one of your biggest priorities, they're just going to steal the weights anyway.”
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PredictionNot checkable as stated
Hendrycks: US-China race will force rapid, high-risk military AI integration
“China can have AIs that are totally aligned with them. The U S can have AIs that are totally aligned with them. You still are going to have a strategic competition between the two. This is going to they're going to need to integrate it in their militaries. The…”
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