existential-risk
(2)
Dan Hendrycks
Dan Hendrycks is the Executive Director of the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), the UC Berkeley PhD who created MMLU - the benchmark that shaped how the world measures AI intelligence - and invented GELU, the activation function running inside BERT, GPT, and virtually every major AI model. From a rural evangelical town in Missouri, he's become one of AI safety's most consequential voices, advising Elon Musk's xAI and Scale AI while sounding alarms about civilizational-scale AI risk, accepting $1/year to keep his independence intact.
Kelsey Piper
Kelsey Piper is an American journalist and effective altruism advocate best known for her work at Vox's Future Perfect newsletter, where she spent seven years covering AI safety, global catastrophic risks, evidence-based philanthropy, and education policy. She broke major stories including OpenAI's non-disparagement agreements and conducted the first post-collapse interview with Sam Bankman-Fried. In August 2025, she left Vox to co-found The Argument, a Substack newsletter focused on reasoned policy debate. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who pledged 30% of her lifetime income to charity, Piper brings a rare combination of technical fluency, ethical rigor, and accessibility to some of the most consequential questions of our time.