Dane Sherburn
About me
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Contractor (Preparedness Team), OpenAI
- My work to date has focused on designing and implementing medium- and high-risk model autonomy evaluations for the Preparedness framework.
- Public examples include SWE-bench Verified, which measures a model's ability to solve real-world software issues, and MLE-bench, which measures an agent's ability to do machine learning engineering. These have been featured in the Financial Times and the Lex Fridman podcast, among other outlets.
- I also contributed to the GPT-4o and o1 system cards, which outline the safety tests run prior to their release.
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Contractor (Policy Team), OpenAI
- My work focused on designing & creating evaluations in the Policy Team.
- These include MakeMeSay, which measures a model's ability to manipulate humans without them knowing, Human-Relative MLAgentBench, which measures a model's ability to do AI R&D, one that wasn't open sourced, and others that I second-authored: Bugged Tools, MakeMePay and Twenty Questions.
- I also contributed to and helped maintain the OpenAI evals repo.
- Some evals I developed were mentioned on the OpenAI blog, and our project, the Dangerous Capability Evaluations project, was mentioned by Sam Altman in Congress.
- Machine Learning Alignment Theory Scholar, Stanford Existential Risks Initiative
- MEng Maths and Computer Science, Imperial College London
Fun hacky projects
- BitBlaster-16 is a 16-bit computer built from scratch using only NAND gates and data flip-flops as primitives! :) It has its own assembly language, compiler and operating system. I wrote a few programs on it, including an autograd engine to do backpropagation in computational graphs.
- Fermi Poker is a fun way to get better at making predictions under uncertainty. Anecdotally I've found friends get much better at making well-calibrated predictions after just a few rounds!
Links
- danesherbs[at]gmail[dot]com
- github.com/danesherbs
I tend to limit my time on social media and news sites, as I find they often skew negative. As Niall Ferguson put it, "Social media is a polarization machine that we can't turn off". Wikipedia and Metaculus have become my go-to for staying informed about current events — I think they're both underrated. For those interested in this perspective, I recommend Rolf Dobelli's "Stop Reading the News".