Sobering Up on AI Progress w/ Dr. Sean McGregor

Sobering Up on AI Progress w/ Dr. Sean McGregor

From Into AI Safety by Jacob Haimes

December 29, 2025 · 1h 14m · Episode 26

About this episode

Jacob Haimes interviews Sean McGregor about the challenges in evaluating AI systems and his contributions to AI safety.

Sean McGregor and I discuss about why evaluating AI systems has become so difficult; we cover everything from the breakdown of benchmarking, how incentives shape safety work, and what approaches like BenchRisk (his recent paper at NeurIPS) and AI auditing aim to fix as systems move into the real world. We also talk about his history and journey in AI safety, including his PhD on ML for public policy, how he started the AI Incident Database, and what he's working on now: AVERI, a non-profit for frontier model auditing. Chapters (00:00) - Intro (02:36) - What's broken about benchmarking (03:41) - Sean’s wild PhD (14:28) - The phantom internship (19:25) - Sean's journey (22:25) - Market-vs-regulatory modes and AIID (32:13) - Drunk on AI progress (38:34) - BenchRisk (43:20) - Moral hazards and Master Hand (50:34) - Liability, Section 230, and open source (59:20) - AVERI (01:11:30) - Closing thoughts & outro Links Sean McGregor's website AVERI website BenchRisk BenchRisk website NeurIPS paper - Risk Management for Mitigating Benchmark Failure Modes: BenchRisk NeurIPS paper - AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark AIID AI Incident Database website IAAI paper…

People in this episode

Host: Jacob Haimes

Guest: Sean McGregor

Topics covered

  • AI safety
  • benchmarking
  • public policy
  • AI auditing
  • machine learning

Keywords

  • AI systems
  • benchmarking
  • safety work
  • public policy
  • AI auditing
  • AVERI
  • BenchRisk

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: AVERI, AI Incident Database, BenchRisk, NeurIPS

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