You could call it nervous energy, but that’s not quite it.
He doesn’t seem nervous.
He has a lot to say.
A lot to warn about.
It’s only been a year since he cofounded the Center for AI Safety. And it’s only been a few months since he attracted severe funding for the nonprofit.
But Hendricks, 27, who recently completed a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, has already emerged as an essential voice in what may be the most critical discussion in the world.
He’s written several influential papers on the catastrophic risks artificial intelligence poses.
He has helped test, or “red team,” ChatGPT for dangerous tendencies. And he is advising industry leaders and policymakers all over the globe on how AI could go sideways.
Recently, he made his biggest splash yet when he convinced some of the most prominent figures in artificial intelligence — including Sam Altman of OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed lab behind ChatGPT; Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind; and Dario Amodei of Anthropic — to sign a brief, bracing statement that reads, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
But if Hendricks has managed to sound the alarm, it’s unclear whether it will be heeded.
The AI labs and their deep-pocketed patrons may profess concern about the technology’s dark potential, but they’re forging ahead anyway.
“A race starts today,” declared Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella when the company launched its AI-powered search engine in February, adding later, “We’re going to move fast.” Another Microsoft executive, in an internal email urging swift movement on AI, wrote that it would be an “absolutely fatal error at this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later.”
And heedless AI merchants aren’t…