When OpenAI announced plans to convert from nonprofit to for-profit control last October, it likely didn’t anticipate the legal labyrinth it now faces. A recent court order in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company suggests OpenAI’s restructuring faces serious legal threats, which will complicate its efforts to raise tens of billions in investment. As nonprofit legal expert Rose Chan Loui explains, the court order set up multiple pathways for OpenAI’s conversion to be challenged. Though Judge Y...
Mar 07, 2025•37 min
A casino offers you a game. A coin will be tossed. If it comes up heads on the first flip you win $2. If it comes up on the second flip you win $4. If it comes up on the third you win $8, the fourth you win $16, and so on. How much should you be willing to pay to play? The standard way of analysing gambling problems, ‘expected value’ — in which you multiply probabilities by the value of each outcome and then sum them up — says your expected earnings are infinite. You have a 50% chance of winning...
Feb 25, 2025•3 hr 42 min
America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially. As today's guest — Jeffrey Lewis, founder of Arms Control Wonk and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies — explains, in its official 'OPLANs' (military operation plans), the US is committed to 'dominating' in a nuclear war with Russia. How would they do that? "That is redacted." Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in ...
Feb 19, 2025•2 hr 41 min
Technology doesn’t force us to do anything — it merely opens doors. But military and economic competition pushes us through. That’s how today’s guest Allan Dafoe — director of frontier safety and governance at Google DeepMind — explains one of the deepest patterns in technological history: once a powerful new capability becomes available, societies that adopt it tend to outcompete those that don’t. Those who resist too much can find themselves taken over or rendered irrelevant. Links to learn mo...
Feb 14, 2025•2 hr 44 min
On Monday Musk made the OpenAI nonprofit foundation an offer they want to refuse, but might have trouble doing so: $97.4 billion for its stake in the for-profit company, plus the freedom to stick with its current charitable mission. For a normal company takeover bid, this would already be spicy. But OpenAI’s unique structure — a nonprofit foundation controlling a for-profit corporation — turns the gambit into an audacious attack on the plan OpenAI announced in December to free itself from nonpro...
Feb 12, 2025•57 min
Will LLMs soon be made into autonomous agents? Will they lead to job losses? Is AI misinformation overblown? Will it prove easy or hard to create AGI? And how likely is it that it will feel like something to be a superhuman AGI? With AGI back in the headlines, we bring you 15 opinionated highlights from the show addressing those and other questions, intermixed with opinions from hosts Luisa Rodriguez and Rob Wiblin recorded back in 2023. Check out the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website....
Feb 10, 2025•3 hr 12 min
If someone said a global health and development programme was sustainable, participatory, and holistic, you'd have to guess that they were saying something positive. But according to today's guest Karen Levy — deworming pioneer and veteran of Innovations for Poverty Action, Evidence Action, and Y Combinator — each of those three concepts has become so fashionable that they're at risk of being seriously overrated and applied where they don't belong. Rebroadcast: this episode was originally releas...
Feb 07, 2025•3 hr 10 min
“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” Those words were produced by the AI model LaMDA as a reply to Blake Lemoine in 2022. Based on the Google engineer’s interactions with the model as it was under development, Lemoine became convinced it was sentient and worthy of moral consideration — and decided to tell the world . Few experts in machine learning, philosophy of mind, or other relevant fields have agreed. And for our part at 80,000 Hours, we don’t think it’s very likely...
Feb 04, 2025•1 hr 15 min
If a business has spent $100 million developing a product, it’s a fair bet that they don’t want it stolen in two seconds and uploaded to the web where anyone can use it for free. This problem exists in extreme form for AI companies. These days, the electricity and equipment required to train cutting-edge machine learning models that generate uncanny human text and images can cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. But once trained, such models may be only a few gigabytes in size and run ju...
Jan 31, 2025•2 hr 41 min
What in the world is intrinsically good — good in itself even if it has no other effects? Over the millennia, people have offered many answers: joy, justice, equality, accomplishment, loving god, wisdom, and plenty more. The question is a classic that makes for great dorm-room philosophy discussion. But it’s hardly just of academic interest. The issue of what (if anything) is intrinsically valuable bears on every action we take, whether we’re looking to improve our own lives, or to help others. ...
Jan 22, 2025•2 hr 26 min
Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable, premarital sex was an abomination, women should obey their husbands, and commoners should obey their monarchs. Wind back 10,000 years and things look very different again. Most hunter-gatherer groups thought men who got too big for their britches needed to be put in their place rather than obeyed, and lifelong monogamy could hardly be expected of me...
Jan 15, 2025•3 hr 41 min
Is war in long-term decline? Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature brought this previously obscure academic question to the centre of public debate, and pointed to rates of death in war to argue energetically that war is on the way out. But that idea divides war scholars and statisticians, and so Better Angels has prompted a spirited debate, with datasets and statistical analyses exchanged back and forth year after year. The lack of consensus has left a somewhat bewildered public (incl...
Jan 08, 2025•2 hr 48 min
"A shameless recycling of existing content to drive additional audience engagement on the cheap… or the single best, most valuable, and most insight-dense episode we put out in the entire year, depending on how you want to look at it." — Rob Wiblin It’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode, including: How to use the microphone on someone’s mobile phone to figure out what password they’re typing into their laptop Why mercilessly ...
Dec 27, 2024•2 hr 50 min
Rich countries seem to find it harder and harder to do anything that creates some losers. People who don’t want houses, offices, power stations, trains, subway stations (or whatever) built in their area can usually find some way to block them, even if the benefits to society outweigh the costs 10 or 100 times over. The result of this ‘vetocracy’ has been skyrocketing rent in major cities — not to mention exacerbating homelessness, energy poverty, and a host of other social maladies . This has be...
Dec 19, 2024•3 hr 26 min
"I really don’t want to give the impression that I think it is easy to make predictable, controlled, safe interventions in wild systems where there are many species interacting. I don’t think it’s easy, but I don’t see any reason to think that it’s impossible. And I think we have been making progress. I think there’s every reason to think that if we continue doing research, both at the theoretical level — How do ecosystems work? What sorts of things are likely to have what sorts of indirect effe...
Nov 29, 2024•3 hr 21 min
One OpenAI critic calls it “the theft of at least the millennium and quite possibly all of human history.” Are they right? Back in 2015 OpenAI was but a humble nonprofit. That nonprofit started a for-profit, OpenAI LLC, but made sure to retain ownership and control. But that for-profit, having become a tech giant with vast staffing and investment, has grown tired of its shackles and wants to change the deal. Facing off against it stand eight out-gunned and out-numbered part-time volunteers. Can ...
Nov 27, 2024•1 hr 22 min
"I think stories are the way we shift the Overton window — so widen the range of things that are acceptable for policy and palatable to the public. Almost by definition, a lot of things that are going to be really important and shape the future are not in the Overton window, because they sound weird and off-putting and very futuristic. But I think stories are the best way to bring them in." — Elizabeth Cox In today’s episode, Keiran Harris speaks with Elizabeth Cox — founder of the independent p...
Nov 21, 2024•2 hr 22 min
"I think one of the reasons I took [shutting down my charity] so hard is because entrepreneurship is all about this bets-based mindset. So you say, “I’m going to take a bunch of bets. I’m going to take some risky bets that have really high upside.” And this is a winning strategy in life, but maybe it’s not a winning strategy for any given hand. So the fact of the matter is that I believe that intellectually, but l do not believe that emotionally. And I have now met a bunch of people who are real...
Nov 14, 2024•2 hr 59 min
With kids very much on the team's mind we thought it would be fun to review some comments about parenting featured on the show over the years, then have hosts Luisa Rodriguez and Rob Wiblin react to them. Links to learn more and full transcript. After hearing 8 former guests’ insights, Luisa and Rob chat about: Which of these resonate the most with Rob, now that he’s been a dad for six months (plus an update at nine months). What have been the biggest surprises for Rob in becoming a parent. How ...
Nov 08, 2024•1 hr 36 min
"In that famous example of the dress, half of the people in the world saw [blue and black], half saw [white and gold]. It turns out there’s individual differences in how brains take into account ambient light. Colour is one example where it’s pretty clear that what we experience is a kind of inference: it’s the brain’s best guess about what’s going on in some way out there in the world. And that’s the claim that I’ve taken on board as a general hypothesis for consciousness: that all our perceptu...
Nov 01, 2024•2 hr 34 min
If you care about social impact, is voting important? In this piece, Rob investigates the two key things that determine the impact of your vote: The chances of your vote changing an election’s outcome. How much better some candidates are for the world as a whole, compared to others. He then discusses a couple of the best arguments against voting in important elections, namely: If an election is competitive, that means other people disagree about which option is better, and you’re at some risk of...
Oct 28, 2024•33 min
"You have a tank split in two parts: if the fish gets in the compartment with a red circle, it will receive food, and food will be delivered in the other tank as well. If the fish takes the blue triangle, this fish will receive food, but nothing will be delivered in the other tank. So we have a prosocial choice and antisocial choice. When there is no one in the other part of the tank, the male is choosing randomly. If there is a male, a possible rival: antisocial — almost 100% of the time. Now, ...
Oct 23, 2024•3 hr 11 min
Rob Wiblin speaks with FiveThirtyEight election forecaster and author Nate Silver about his new book: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything . Links to learn more, highlights, video, and full transcript. On the Edge explores a cultural grouping Nate dubs “the River” — made up of people who are analytical, competitive, quantitatively minded, risk-taking, and willing to be contrarian. It’s a tendency he considers himself a part of, and the River has been doing well for itself in recent decades...
Oct 16, 2024•1 hr 58 min
"In the human case, it would be mistaken to give a kind of hour-by-hour accounting. You know, 'I had +4 level of experience for this hour, then I had -2 for the next hour, and then I had -1' — and you sort of sum to try to work out the total… And I came to think that something like that will be applicable in some of the animal cases as well… There are achievements, there are experiences, there are things that can be done in the face of difficulty that might be seen as having the same kind of red...
Oct 03, 2024•1 hr 25 min
In this episode from our second show, 80k After Hours , Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris chat about the consequences of letting go of enduring guilt, shame, anger, and pride. Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript. They cover: Keiran’s views on free will, and how he came to hold them What it’s like not experiencing sustained guilt, shame, and anger Whether Luisa would become a worse person if she felt less guilt and shame — specifically whether she’d work fewer hours, or donate le...
Sep 27, 2024•1 hr 36 min
"For every far-out idea that turns out to be true, there were probably hundreds that were simply crackpot ideas. In general, [science] advances building on the knowledge we have, and seeing what the next questions are, and then getting to the next stage and the next stage and so on. And occasionally there’ll be revolutionary ideas which will really completely change your view of science. And it is possible that some revolutionary breakthrough in our understanding will come about and we might cra...
Sep 19, 2024•2 hr 20 min
"Perception is quite difficult with cameras: even if you have a stereo camera, you still can’t really build a map of where everything is in space. It’s just very difficult. And I know that sounds surprising, because humans are very good at this. In fact, even with one eye, we can navigate and we can clear the dinner table. But it seems that we’re building in a lot of understanding and intuition about what’s happening in the world and where objects are and how they behave. For robots, it’s very d...
Sep 13, 2024•2 hr 2 min
"It’s very hard to find examples where people say, 'I’m starting from this point. I’m starting from this belief.' So we wanted to make that very legible to people. We wanted to say, 'Experts think this; accurate forecasters think this.' They might both be wrong, but we can at least start from here and figure out where we’re coming into a discussion and say, 'I am much less concerned than the people in this report; or I am much more concerned, and I think people in this report were missing major ...
Sep 04, 2024•2 hr 49 min
"I do think that there is a really significant sentiment among parts of the opposition that it’s not really just that this bill itself is that bad or extreme — when you really drill into it, it feels like one of those things where you read it and it’s like, ' This is the thing that everyone is screaming about?' I think it’s a pretty modest bill in a lot of ways, but I think part of what they are thinking is that this is the first step to shutting down AI development. Or that if California does t...
Aug 29, 2024•1 hr 13 min
"This is a group of animals I think people are particularly unfamiliar with. They are especially poorly covered in our science curriculum; they are especially poorly understood, because people don’t spend as much time learning about them at museums; and they’re just harder to spend time with in a lot of ways, I think, for people. So people have pets that are vertebrates that they take care of across the taxonomic groups, and people get familiar with those from going to zoos and watching their be...
Aug 26, 2024•3 hr 48 min
