The most important conversations about artificial intelligence you won’t hear anywhere else.
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Hosted by Rob Wiblin, Luisa Rodriguez, and Zershaaneh Qureshi.
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Former White House staffer Dean Ball thinks it's very likely some form of 'superintelligence' arrives in under 20 years. He thinks AI being used for bioweapon research is "a real threat model, obviously." He worries about dangerous "power imbalances" should AI companies reach "$50 trillion market caps." And he believes the agriculture revolution probably worsened human health and wellbeing. Given that, you might expect him to be pushing for AI regulation. Instead, he’s become one of the field’s ...
We often worry about AI models “hallucinating” or making honest mistakes. But what happens when a model knows the truth, but decides to deceive you anyway to achieve a goal of its own? This isn’t sci-fi — it’s happening regularly in deployment today. Marius Hobbhahn, CEO of the world’s top research organisation focused on AI deception ( Apollo Research ), has been collaborating with OpenAI to figure out what causes OpenAI’s reasoning models to 'scheme' against users. Links to learn more, video, ...
Global fertility rates aren’t just falling: the rate of decline is accelerating. From 2006 to 2016, fertility dropped gradually, but since 2016 the rate of decline has increased 4.5-fold. In many wealthy countries, fertility is now below 1.5. While we don’t notice it yet, in time that will mean the population halves every 60 years. Rob Wiblin is already a parent and Luisa Rodriguez is about to be, which prompted the two hosts of the show to get together to chat about all things parenting — inclu...
If you work in AI, you probably think it’s going to boost productivity, create wealth, advance science, and improve your life. If you’re a member of the American public, you probably strongly disagree. In three major reports released over the last year, the Pew Research Center surveyed over 5,000 US adults and 1,000 AI experts. They found that the general public holds many beliefs about AI that are virtually nonexistent in Silicon Valley, and that the tech industry’s pitch about the likely benef...
Last December, the OpenAI business put forward a plan to completely sideline its nonprofit board. But two state attorneys general have now blocked that effort and kept that board very much alive and kicking. The for-profit’s trouble was that the entire operation was founded on the premise of — and legally pledged to — the purpose of ensuring that “ artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity .” So to get its restructure past regulators, the business entity has had to agree to 20 ser...
With the US racing to develop AGI and superintelligence ahead of China, you might expect the two countries to be negotiating how they’ll deploy AI, including in the military, without coming to blows. But according to Helen Toner, director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology in DC, “the US and Chinese governments are barely talking at all.” Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/ht25 In her role as a founder, and now leader, of DC’s top think tank focused...
For years, working on AI safety usually meant theorising about the ‘alignment problem’ or trying to convince other people to give a damn. If you could find any way to help, the work was frustrating and low feedback. According to Anthropic’s Holden Karnofsky, this situation has now reversed completely. There are now large amounts of useful, concrete, shovel-ready projects with clear goals and deliverables. Holden thinks people haven’t appreciated the scale of the shift, and wants everyone to see ...
This episode features Daniel Kokotajlo, author of AI 2027, detailing a scenario where superintelligence arrives by the decade's end. He explores the chilling implications of AI race dynamics, including industrial espionage, the rapid creation of a robot economy, and the crucial problem of AI misalignment that could lead to human extinction. Daniel also discusses an alternative "slowdown" ending and his vision for a positive future, emphasizing international coordination, transparency, and hardware verification as essential safeguards against catastrophic outcomes.
Conventional wisdom is that safeguarding humanity from the worst biological risks — microbes optimised to kill as many as possible — is difficult bordering on impossible, making bioweapons humanity’s single greatest vulnerability. Andrew Snyder-Beattie thinks conventional wisdom could be wrong. Andrew’s job at Open Philanthropy is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to protect as much of humanity as possible in the worst-case scenarios — those with fatality rates near 100% and the collapse ...
Jake Sullivan was the US National Security Advisor from 2021-2025. He joined our friends on The Cognitive Revolution podcast in August to discuss AI as a critical national security issue. We thought it was such a good interview and we wanted more people to see it, so we’re cross-posting it here on The 80,000 Hours Podcast . Jake and host Nathan Labenz discuss: Jake’s four-category framework to think about AI risks and opportunities: security, economics, society, and existential. Why Jake advocat...
At 26, Neel Nanda leads an AI safety team at Google DeepMind, has published dozens of influential papers, and mentored 50 junior researchers — seven of whom now work at major AI companies. His secret? “It’s mostly luck,” he says, but “another part is what I think of as maximising my luck surface area.” Video, full transcript, and links to learn more: https://80k.info/nn2 This means creating as many opportunities as possible for surprisingly good things to happen: Write publicly. Reach out to res...
We don’t know how AIs think or why they do what they do. Or at least, we don’t know much. That fact is only becoming more troubling as AIs grow more capable and appear on track to wield enormous cultural influence, directly advise on major government decisions, and even operate military equipment autonomously. We simply can’t tell what models, if any, should be trusted with such authority. Neel Nanda of Google DeepMind is one of the founding figures of the field of machine learning trying to fix...
What happens when you lock two AI systems in a room together and tell them they can discuss anything they want? According to experiments run by Kyle Fish — Anthropic’s first AI welfare researcher — something consistently strange: the models immediately begin discussing their own consciousness before spiraling into increasingly euphoric philosophical dialogue that ends in apparent meditative bliss. Highlights, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/kf “We started calling this a ‘spiritual b...
About half of people are worried they’ll lose their job to AI. They’re right to be concerned: AI can now complete real-world coding tasks on GitHub, generate photorealistic video, drive a taxi more safely than humans, and do accurate medical diagnosis. And over the next five years, it’s set to continue to improve rapidly. Eventually, mass automation and falling wages are a real possibility. But what’s less appreciated is that while AI drives down the value of skills it can do, it drives up the v...
What happens when civilisation faces its greatest tests? This compilation brings together insights from researchers, defence experts, philosophers, and policymakers on humanity’s ability to survive and recover from catastrophic events. From nuclear winter and electromagnetic pulses to pandemics and climate disasters, we explore both the threats that could bring down modern civilisation and the practical solutions that could help us bounce back. Learn more and see the full transcript: https://80k...
Ryan Greenblatt — lead author on the explosive paper “ Alignment faking in large language models ” and chief scientist at Redwood Research — thinks there’s a 25% chance that within four years, AI will be able to do everything needed to run an AI company, from writing code to designing experiments to making strategic and business decisions. As Ryan lays out, AI models are “marching through the human regime”: systems that could handle five-minute tasks two years ago now tackle 90-minute projects. ...
The era of making AI smarter just by making it bigger is ending. But that doesn’t mean progress is slowing down — far from it. AI models continue to get much more powerful, just using very different methods, and those underlying technical changes force a big rethink of what coming years will look like. Toby Ord — Oxford philosopher and bestselling author of The Precipice — has been tracking these shifts and mapping out the implications both for governments and our lives. Links to learn more, vid...
For decades, US allies have slept soundly under the protection of America’s overwhelming military might. Donald Trump — with his threats to ditch NATO, seize Greenland, and abandon Taiwan — seems hell-bent on shattering that comfort. But according to Hugh White — one of the world's leading strategic thinkers, emeritus professor at the Australian National University, and author of Hard New World: Our Post-American Future — Trump isn't destroying American hegemony. He's simply revealing that it's ...
AI models today have a 50% chance of successfully completing a task that would take an expert human one hour. Seven months ago, that number was roughly 30 minutes — and seven months before that, 15 minutes. (See graph .) These are substantial, multi-step tasks requiring sustained focus: building web applications, conducting machine learning research, or solving complex programming challenges. Today’s guest, Beth Barnes, is CEO of METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research) — the leading organi...
What if there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp — or a chatbot? For centuries, humans have debated the nature of consciousness, often placing ourselves at the very top. But what about the minds of others — both the animals we share this planet with and the artificial intelligences we’re creating? We’ve pulled together clips from past conversations with researchers and philosophers who’ve spent years trying to make sense of animal consciousness, artificial sentience, and moral consideration un...
OpenAI’s recent announcement that its nonprofit would “retain control” of its for-profit business sounds reassuring. But this seemingly major concession, celebrated by so many, is in itself largely meaningless. Litigator Tyler Whitmer is a coauthor of a newly published letter that describes this attempted sleight of hand and directs regulators on how to stop it. As Tyler explains, the plan both before and after this announcement has been to convert OpenAI into a Delaware public benefit corporati...
This episode explores the accelerating plausibility of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by 2030, highlighting how CEOs of leading AI companies have dramatically shortened their timelines. Benjamin Todd's article breaks down four key drivers of recent AI progress: massively scaled pre-training, reinforcement learning for reasoning, increased model thinking time, and advanced agent scaffolding. While these trends suggest AI systems could soon achieve beyond-human performance in coding and scientific research, the analysis also addresses significant bottlenecks in compute, energy, and human capital around 2030. The episode concludes by presenting two potential futures—explosive change or a significant slowdown—making the next five years crucial for determining AI's trajectory.
When attorneys general intervene in corporate affairs, it usually means something has gone seriously wrong. In OpenAI’s case, it appears to have forced a dramatic reversal of the company’s plans to sideline its nonprofit foundation, announced in a blog post that made headlines worldwide. The company’s sudden announcement that its nonprofit will “retain control” credits “constructive dialogue” with the attorneys general of California and Delaware — corporate-speak for what was likely a far more c...
When you have a system where ministers almost never understand their portfolios, civil servants change jobs every few months, and MPs don't grasp parliamentary procedure even after decades in office — is the problem the people, or the structure they work in? Today's guest, political journalist Ian Dunt , studies the systemic reasons governments succeed and fail. And in his book How Westminster Works ...and Why It Doesn't , he argues that Britain's government dysfunction and multi-decade failure ...
How do you navigate a career path when the future of work is uncertain? How important is mentorship versus immediate impact? Is it better to focus on your strengths or on the world’s most pressing problems? Should you specialise deeply or develop a unique combination of skills? From embracing failure to finding unlikely allies, we bring you 16 diverse perspectives from past guests who’ve found unconventional paths to impact and helped others do the same. Links to learn more and full transcript. ...
Throughout history, technological revolutions have fundamentally shifted the balance of power in society. The Industrial Revolution created conditions where democracies could flourish for the first time — as nations needed educated, informed, and empowered citizens to deploy advanced technologies and remain competitive. Unfortunately there’s every reason to think artificial general intelligence (AGI) will reverse that trend. Today’s guest — Tom Davidson of the Forethought Centre for AI Strategy ...
"We are aiming for a place where we can decouple the scorecard from our worthiness. It’s of course the case that in trying to optimise the good, we will always be falling short. The question is how much, and in what ways are we not there yet? And if we then extrapolate that to how much and in what ways am I not enough, that’s where we run into trouble." —Hannah Boettcher What happens when your desire to do good starts to undermine your own wellbeing? Over the years, we’ve heard from therapists, ...
Most AI safety conversations centre on alignment: ensuring AI systems share our values and goals. But despite progress, we’re unlikely to know we’ve solved the problem before the arrival of human-level and superhuman systems in as little as three years. So some are developing a backup plan to safely deploy models we fear are actively scheming to harm us — so-called “AI control.” While this may sound mad, given the reluctance of AI companies to delay deploying anything they train, not developing ...
"There’s almost no story of the future going well that doesn’t have a part that’s like '…and no evil person steals the AI weights and goes and does evil stuff.' So it has highlighted the importance of information security: 'You’re training a powerful AI system; you should make it hard for someone to steal' has popped out to me as a thing that just keeps coming up in these stories, keeps being present. It’s hard to tell a story where it’s not a factor. It’s easy to tell a story where it is a fact...
The 20th century saw unprecedented change: nuclear weapons, satellites, the rise and fall of communism, third-wave feminism, the internet, postmodernism, game theory, genetic engineering, the Big Bang theory, quantum mechanics, birth control, and more. Now imagine all of it compressed into just 10 years. That’s the future Will MacAskill — philosopher, founding figure of effective altruism, and now researcher at the Forethought Centre for AI Strategy — argues we need to prepare for in his new pap...
