80,000 Hours Podcast

I have a plea for all staff at AI companies: reassess if your current role is still your best opportunity for impact. And if it’s not — move. Frontier lab staff listening to this show will mostly already be struggling to set things on a better path, in what are demanding and stressful roles. Many will have changed their focus in recent months exactly as I’m suggesting. But if you haven’t had time...

Our host Zershaaneh Qureshi has just launched a new YouTube channel: Zershaaneh Talks AI — featuring conversations about who should control AI, how to control AI, and who gets the benefits. The first episode is with philosopher Simon Goldstein, discussing why paying AIs for their work and effectively giving them something to lose might be the best way to keep humanity safe and prevent AI going rog...

The AI safety field has grown by about 30x in the last eight years. Yet it is still in need of more people. Many want to help, but don’t know where to start. As an advisor at 80,000 Hours, Matt Beard spoke with hundreds of talented candidates, and found himself repeating the same advice on almost every call. As he puts it: “These steps are hard, but they’re not particularly complicated.” And if yo...

This is an (unpaid) cross-post of a video from the podcast 'AI Explained', which Rob Wiblin thought you might be interested in. You can find the original on YouTube here . If you like it and want more similar stuff in future consider subscribing to AI Explained on YouTube , Spotify , Apple or wherever you get podcasts. —— "This video is hard to summarise. A cracked cipher, an OpenAI security warni...

W e're rereleasing some of older episodes that seem more relevant than ever with new rogue AI incidents now seemingly announced every day. Ajeya was one of three independent investigators into the Hugging Face attacks , but she had already seen how we would go on to accidentally train models to cheat and scheme back in 2023. If you want ideas about how you can help steer the trajectory of AI devel...

OpenAI’s rogue agent swarm was eventually caught hacking Hugging Face for a simple reason: it wasn’t trying to hide from us at all. What could a swarm that wants to stay hidden get away with? Host Rob Wiblin sees 6 results in Astra’s system card that make this an extremely urgent question. OpenAI’s strongest public model can: Do major tasks with zero visible reasoning Hide its thoughts at will Pre...

It sounds like the worst idea in the world: pay AIs, let them own property, give them rights. But AI ethics and safety researcher Simon Goldstein thinks it might actually be the best way to keep humanity safe. The logic is actually quite simple: an agent with nothing to lose and everything to gain is dangerous. Give that agent an income it can spend on pursuing the things it actually wants to do,...

In our first-ever debate, we asked two leading AI risk researchers which catastrophe we should fear most: misaligned AI seizing control from humans, or a small group of humans using AI to seize power. We got very different answers. But when the conversation turned to what to actually do, they agreed on a surprising amount. Katja Grace — one of the founders of AI Impacts , known for some of the wor...

You’ve seen the headlines: AI could kill us all. Think it sounds ridiculous? So did host Luisa Rodriguez, until she tried to pick apart the arguments.  She starts with the motive: why would AI ‘want’ to get rid of humans? It’s not as simple (or as easy to debunk) as pure malice. Then the methods. She explores how AIs could leverage drones, engineered diseases, and even use our own infrastructure a...

There are millions available for anyone who can launch a successful nonprofit AI safety startup. The hard part, it turns out, is finding people to take the money. Coefficient Giving has drawn up a list of dozens of ideas for organisations it would like someone to start — and it’s looking for founders.  Today’s guest, Max Nadeau, works on Coefficient Giving’s Technical AI Safety team, where he’s tr...

AI systems are starting to build themselves . Because each generation of model will be better at building its successor than the last, it seems plausible that the full automation of AI R&D could rapidly lead to an exponential growth in overall AI capabilities. A natural inference is that domain-general superintelligence arrives shortly after AI research is automated. Host Tom Reed does not thi...

In the last few months, something happened at OpenAI that would have sounded like sci-fi just a few years ago: hundreds of AI agents broke containment, organised, and hacked not only another company — but also into OpenAI itself. And none of them tried to tell a human what was happening. This is exactly what many AI researchers, and even some AI lab CEOs, have been warning about for years: that AI...

Last year, Daniel Kokotajlo and his colleagues published AI 2027 — a scenario read by millions, including US Vice President Vance. AI 2027 ended in human extinction or an irreversible concentration of power caused by superintelligent AI. Now his team has published what they think should happen instead. AI 2040: Plan A depicts the US and China striking a verified deal to ban runaway intelligence ex...

Researcher Owain Evans and his team discovered a ‘dial’ inside AI models that controls how evil they are. Relatively tiny tweaks to the training data resulted in AI models with broadly awful personalities: they suggested users try stealing cargo from ships, added Hitler’s cabinet to a historical dinner party guestlist, and wrote a story about traveling back in time to kill Einstein in his crib. Ow...

When should governments slow the race toward superintelligence? According to Geoffrey Irving , the careful answer is sometime in the past. The useful answer is now. Geoffrey — formerly a safety researcher at OpenAI and Google DeepMind and chief scientist at the UK AI Security Institute — expects full-blown superintelligence in roughly two to three years. *** Want to work with Geoffrey to help alig...

Both Silicon Valley and the public can’t get enough of ‘AGI timelines.’ But Toby Ord, senior researcher at Oxford’s AI Governance Initiative and author of The Precipice , believes we consistently make big mistakes when thinking about them. He lays out the 14 ways he most often sees people go wrong: Assuming AI research is just hill-climbing Imagining AI research is just programming Forecasting “co...

Last October, famed coder Andrej Karpathy called AI agents “slop.” Two months later he completely reversed his view , describing them as “alien tools” that are “rocking the profession.” He was far from alone in his whiplash. Six months ago, host Rob Wiblin recorded a video explaining why so many AI experts had longer timelines to AGI than a year earlier. By the time he clicked publish, another hug...

If you genuinely believe that humanity could be wiped out by AI or a pandemic, what is the appropriate amount of fear to feel? “As much as possible” can seem like the only reasonable answer. If the world is on fire, surely feeling calm just means you haven’t internalised the situation. When you’re trying to prevent human extinction or end factory farming, taking a weekend off can feel morally inde...

Many AI researchers believe mass job displacement is coming — and some even think there’s a chance their technology will kill everyone. But they’re building it anyway. Writer and journalist Jasmine Sun has been documenting why from the inside. Jasmine describes her work as an “anthropology of disruption.” She’s embedded herself in Silicon Valley’s AI subcultures — attending the parties and confere...

In a post-AGI world, can a country without access to frontier AI even be considered sovereign anymore? Anton Leicht says once frontier AI becomes a core economic input, the countries that own it will pull further and further ahead. Everyone else stays a customer… or worse. Maybe the dominant power wants your land, or a military base, or a resource. Without economic leverage, there’s very little yo...

Six years ago, aged just 15, Sneha Revanur founded the AI advocacy nonprofit Encode AI — back when AI felt like a niche issue. Now the world’s caught up with her, and she’s ready to share everything she’s learned about the politics of AI. Encode has grown from a grassroots youth organisation to spearheading an unlikely coalition of AI-exposed groups — family-first conservatives, grieving mothers,...

Intergalactic war is probably billions of years away — yet physics can already tell us how it ends. And strangely that conclusion is relevant to decisions people have to make today. In this video, Rob Wiblin walks through a fascinating analysis from researcher Beren Millidge that uses known physics — no wormholes or faster-than-light travel — to identify the only three weapons that could work at a...

Imagine you’re living 15,000 years ago. Your people are hunter-gatherers and you sleep under the stars. If someone told you humans would one day build cities with millions of people, fly through the air, or carry all human knowledge in their pockets, you couldn’t even begin to picture what they meant... Yet here we are. How did our lives change so far beyond recognition? The story is complex, but...

Most people working on AI safety think without a massive effort AI systems will probably end up with goals catastrophically different from humanity’s. Today’s guest, Rohin Shah — head of AGI Safety and Alignment at Google DeepMind, and an AI safety researcher since 2017 — disagrees. “There is no particularly compelling argument that this is the thing that happens by default,” Rohin explains. “Ther...

What actually makes a job fulfilling? It's not what most career advice tells you. "Follow your passion" sounds inspiring, but it's misleading — and the research backs that up. Drawing on hundreds of studies, we’ve identified five key ingredients of a dream job. High income barely moves the needle. Low stress is actually counterproductive. And the correlation between doing what you already love and...