Doom Debates!

Asian Dad Energy is a former big tech developer with an Ivy League education. We have a lot in common. We’re both: * Software engineers; * New-(ish) YouTube creators covering AI; * Dads with a lot of existential angst. But while I dread AI extincting humanity, Asian Dad has other concerns. We debate the risk of the AI bubble popping, a “techno-feudalism” scenario, and whether AI will outperform a...

Peter Clarke ( Team Futurism ) invited me on his podcast to probe the worldview of a Yudkowskian, and I ended up explaining how my 50% P(Doom) and 10% P(Foom) informs my choices. Peter and I met at LessOnline 2026, where he was one of the participants in a live Jubilee-style debate about x-risk. This one’s a little tamer, but we still cover plenty of ground, like: Why nuclear risk is underrated ye...

Dr. Holly Elmore, executive director of PauseAI US, is done giving AI insiders the benefit of the doubt. In this spicy episode, Holly calls out a number of respected figures in the AI safety community for allegedly “selling out” the cause: Effective Altruists, Anthropic & OpenAI employees, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz—and even yours truly! Holly isn’t afraid to psychoanalyze her subjects, whi...

Casey Muratori is one of the top programming educators on YouTube, with a four-decade career building videogames and popular videogame software. We cover his positions on crypto, programming, AI’s impact on programming, and whether he takes the AI doom threat seriously. Casey’s instinct is to break technology down like an engineer until he knows exactly how it’ll operate. Does that approach break...

Bestselling author Robert Wright has landed on a sobering conclusion: on our current trajectory, AI dystopia is likely within eight years. We get into his P(Doom), his case for slowing down, why racing China could backfire into authoritarianism here at home, and why he thinks evolution itself might have a purpose. Bob is the author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero , a Pulitzer finalist, and hosts t...

Doom Debates presents an interactive debate using Jubilee’s popular “Surrounded” format, taped live at LessOnline 2026! I (Liron) claim AI will likely doom us to extinction because: * Godlike ASI is coming soon * We won’t align the first ASIs * Even with aligned ASI, the equilibrium is lethal LessOnline attendees challenge me on each sub-claim one debater at a time, with the audience voting on whe...

The US government banned Claude Fable like a clown show. But I’m happy about it. Here’s my appearance on the AI in the AM livestream (recorded Tue, June 16) with Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan, where I explain why this was good for society. The government’s action shows that we can actually pause AI, a precedent that matters way more than the boneheaded rationale behind Fable’s ban. We then g...

Alex Bores is a generationally strong AI regulation candidate who needs our help to win the NY-12 congressional election next week. Bentham's Bulldog, a.k.a. Matthew Adelstein, joins me to help spread the message. PLEASE DO THIS: * Vote. If you live in Midtown Manhattan, click here to check whether you’re in NY-12 . If so, vote for Alex Bores on Tuesday, June 23rd . * Spread the word. Tell anyone...

Stephen Casper, PhD, is an incoming tenure-track professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Prof. Casper is relatively unworried about the threat of human extinction from rogue superintelligence, but he is concerned about a handful of companies wielding extremely powerful AI and enfeebling the public. That’s why he’s an AI governance hawk who advocates for taxes and regulation to ke...

Kevin Zhu walked away from a lucrative quant career to build Algoverse, one of the most productive mentorship programs for aspiring AI researchers. Can we agree on the best research path to a safe future? Let’s take a ride on the Doom Train! 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:00:58 — Introducing Kevin Zhu 00:02:10 — From Citadel Quant to AI Researcher 00:09:14 — The Story of Founding AlgoVerse 00:12:53 — Dis...

Liron explains the 80-year-old Erdős conjecture that a GPT model breakthrough, Scott Aaronson ponders "the last days of human relevance”, multiple live callers debate me, plus my 7-year-old son drops in to share his P(Doom)! Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:00:42 — First Donation & “Why Is a Duck?” 00:02:54 — Can AI Draw “Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously”? 00:08:26 — Doom Debates Sponsors L...

***ATTENTION: We’re looking for paid help at LessOnline from June 5-7. Apply now!*** OpenAI pushes the frontier of mathematics, Anthropic hires Andrej Karpathy to work on recursive self-improvement, live callers challenge the doom argument, and we've got a soundboard! Doom Debates Paid Gig in Berkeley! Doom Debates is proudly sponsoring The LessOnline conference this year and we got a merch table...

Now that Doom Debates is almost 2 years old, enough time has passed that we can revisit my claims from 2024. I claim they’ve been aging well! In this early episode, I react to Martin Casado , a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) who claims that AI is basically just a buzzword for statistical models and simulations. As a result of this worldview, he only predicts incremental AI progress...

Dr. Ben Goertzel is a pioneering AI researcher, entrepreneur, and author who has helped organize AGI as a research field since the 2000s through books, workshops, and conferences. We talk about the early days of AGI research with Yudkowsky, get Ben’s timeline to the singularity, and I try to understand what makes him so optimistic that superintelligence will be beneficial for humanity. Timestamps...

We recap the Dr. Mike Israetel debate and dig into the nuances of rationality vs. rationalization. Then onto the week's biggest news: Anthropic dethroning OpenAI, Trump and Xi Jinping exploring AI guardrails, and Liron's own company AI going rogue. Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:03:09 — Dr. Mike Israetel Round 2 Recap 00:14:34 — A Viewer Accuses Liron of Rationalizing 00:34:20 — Is Sam Altman...

In December 2023, I joined the Theo Jaffee Podcast to talk about a wide range of topics including non-AI x-risks, where I disagree with Eliezer Yudkwowsky, cryptocurrency and if P(Doom) is rigorous. This episode was recorded 6 months before I'd started Doom Debates. Let's look back with the power of hindsight and see if my answers still hold up. Links #10: Liron Shapira — AI doom, FOOM, rationalis...

Dr. Mike Israetel is back in the arena to FIGHT ME (verbally) about the likelihood of AI killing everyone vs. the likelihood of AI making the universe totally awesome! Back by popular demand after last year’s widely-viewed debate , the renowned exercise scientist, fitness entrepreneur, and low-P(Doom) AI futurist reveals where he gets off the Doom Train™, why he thinks AI is conscious, and how he...

Liron and Producer Ori explore the community's feedback to Eliezer Yudkowsky's $10,000 debate against an anonymous AI director. Plus, we unpack Eliezer's new post on the "irretrievability" of ASI development, Anthropic feasting on xAI's compute, and Liron's 4x Kalshi bet on... Spencer Pratt. Timestamps 00:00:00 — Welcome 00:02:30 — The $10,000 Debate Post-Mortem 00:06:01 — Paul Tudor Jones: “Zero...

Claude, also known as @lumpenspace on X, is a prominent AI accelerationist. He gives humanity a 30% chance of being superseded by superintelligence, and he’s fine with it! We unpack his lattice of beliefs, and pinpoint the cruxes of our disagreement on the orthogonality thesis and the capabilities of superintelligence. Lumpenspace’s appearance comes after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at Sam Altma...

📢 BREAKING: A man known only as "@47fucb4r8c69323" just paid Eliezer Yudkowsky $10,000 to have a raw, uncut, public debate on my YouTube channel! Tensions run high as 47f confronts Eliezer about his "If anyone builds it, everyone dies" rhetoric, warning it could incite unstable individuals to harm AI researchers and their families, while Eliezer maintains that the possibility of extinction from s...

Livestream with Producer Ori covering Eliezer Yudkowsky's next BIG debate, why $GOOG is such a steal at $4T, and what's going down on AI twitter. Timestamps 00:00:00 — Kicking off the Livestream 00:06:08 — Eliezer Yudkowsky Debate Announcement 00:13:17 — Who’s Yudkowsky’s Debate Challenger? 00:25:32 — METR’s Capability Extrapolation Came True 00:28:25 — Google: The Big Rally I Called 00:33:06 — Th...

Justin Helps is the science educator behind ⁨Primer Learning with 2M subscribers. We cover how he got into AI safety, debate AGI timelines, and why he calculates p(doom) to be 70% by 2100 😱. Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:00:38 — Introducing Justin Helps 00:02:03 — What's Your P(Doom)?™ 00:03:38 — Justin's First Exposure to AI X-Risk 00:04:49 — Major Disagreements with Eliezer Yudkowsky 00:09...

Multiple live callers join this month's Q&A as I react to Dwarkesh Patel's $20K blog prize, debate the orthogonality thesis from first principles, and welcome Bernie Sanders aboard the Doom Train. Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:01:00 — Welcome to Doom Debates Live! 00:01:30 — What Do You Think of Open Source Models Out-Benchmarking OpenAI and Anthropic? 00:04:55 — Michael Cheers Joins: What If...

Emad Mostaque helped kick off the modern AI revolution as the head of Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion. Unlike most AI CEOs, he doesn't sugarcoat the risks of AGI development. He explains his 50% P(Doom), why we have less than 1,000 days to get our act together, and how his new startup, Intelligent Internet, aims to be a countervailing force against doom of all kinds. Timestamps 0...

My guest, John Alioto, is an independent AI engineer with a computer science degree from UC Berkeley and 25 years building real-world AI systems at companies like Microsoft and Google. In the wake of an attack on Sam Altman’s property, John Alioto came on the show to argue that Yudkowsky’s words are violent rhetoric that helped create this moment. Since I completely disagree with that characteriza...