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Every episode
80,000 Hours Podcast
30 episodes
The UK's former head AI safety scientist on how to solve alignment before superintelligence arrives | Geoffrey Irving
Aug 11, 2026 · 2 hr 2 min
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 align superintelligence? Resolution is hiring! https://80k.info/work-at-resolution *** The leading AI com…
Where AGI timelines go wrong | Toby Ord, Oxford University
Aug 6, 2026 · 2 hr 46 min
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 “could” instead of “will” Believing the current benchmark is the last one Extrapolating trends with no c…
What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2026? – Rob Wiblin
Aug 4, 2026 · 49 min
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 huge vibe shift was well underway. Evidence of AI acceleration has piled up since: Models now complete s…
#249 – Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world
Jul 28, 2026 · 2 hr 9 min
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 indefensible. But fear is an alarm designed to provoke short bursts of drastic action, not a state human…
#248 – Jasmine Sun on what the people building AI really believe
Jul 21, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min
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 conferences, conducting off-the-record interviews — to understand the beliefs of the small group of people…
#247 – Anton Leicht on how middle powers avoid losing everything in a post-AI world
Jul 14, 2026 · 1 hr 34 min
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 you could do about it. Anton — Carnegie fellow and writer of the blog Threading the Needle — thinks mi…
#246 – Sneha Revanur on how a small team of activists helped pass America's landmark AI safety laws
Jul 8, 2026 · 53 min
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, Hollywood actors, and AI safety researchers — with the strength to take on $125m-funded anti-regulat…
We can guess what intergalactic war would look like. And strangely, it matters.
Jun 18, 2026 · 15 min
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 an intergalactic scale. We then unpack how to best defend against each. The upshot is that at the int…
How AI could create the world’s biggest problems (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)
Jun 11, 2026 · 1 hr 30 min
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 there’s a rough pattern. A few times in history, some radical breakthrough in technology — like the…
#245 – Rohin Shah on what it's really like to run AGI safety at Google DeepMind (and where I disagree with 'doomers')
Jun 2, 2026 · 2 hr 48 min
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. “There’s a lot of arguments that are suggestive that maybe it could happen, such that you should find it…
What makes for a dream job? | Benjamin Todd
May 28, 2026 · 28 min
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 actually enjoying your job? Surprisingly weak. What matters far more is getting good at something t…
#244 – Benjamin Todd on how we’re updating our career advice for the strangest time in history
May 26, 2026 · 1 hr 7 min
The average career is 80,000 hours long. With AI advancing so rapidly, the hours you have left in your career matter more than ever. Some leading AI researchers think there’s a 10% chance that AI systems begin automating AI research itself this year — and a 60% chance by the end of 2028. This could introduce aggressive feedback loops that completely reshape every industry, institution, and career. If these predictions are right, the window for influencing the direction of the future could be clo…
Can AIs already start 'rogue deployments' inside AI companies? (Landmark new METR report)
May 20, 2026 · 20 min
A red-teamer was embedded inside Anthropic for three weeks, told to imagine he was an evil Claude, and asked to figure out how to launch a ‘rogue AI deployment’ without getting caught. It’s one part of a landmark report released yesterday by METR — the outfit behind the task-completion time horizon graph which has become the single most watched measure of AI progress. This major new research push is being conducted with close collaboration from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, and Anthropic, and l…
#243 – 'Godfather of AI' Yoshua Bengio: "I now see a path" to safe superintelligent AI
May 7, 2026 · 2 hr 35 min
The co-inventor of modern AI and the most cited living scientist believes he's figured out how to ensure AI is honest, incapable of deception, and never goes rogue. Yoshua Bengio – Turing Award Winner and founder of LawZero – is disturbed by the many unintended drives and goals present in today's AIs, their willingness to lie, and ability to tell when they're being tested. AI companies are trying to stamp out these behaviours in a 'cat-and-mouse game' that Yoshua fears they're losing. --- Our ne…
'95% of AI Pilots Fail': The hidden agenda behind the viral stat that misled millions
Apr 28, 2026 · 10 min
You might have heard that '95% of corporate AI pilots' are failing. It was one of the most widely cited AI statistics of 2025, parroted by media outlets everywhere. It helped trigger a Nasdaq selloff and became a pillar of the case that 'AI is overhyped'. The problem: it's 100% wrong. And not by accident either. If you carefully read the underlying report, ostensibly from MIT, you find the data point in the opposite direction. But that was all buried, with the authors instead torturing the resul…
#242 – Will MacAskill on how we survive the 'intelligence explosion,' AI character, and the case for 'viatopia'
Apr 22, 2026 · 3 hr 15 min
Hundreds of millions already turn to AI on the most personal of topics — therapy, political opinions, and how to treat others. And as AI takes over more of the economy, the character of these systems will shape culture on an even grander scale, ultimately becoming “the personality of most of the world’s workforce.” So… should they be designed to push us towards the better angels of our nature? Or simply do as we ask? Will MacAskill, philosopher and senior research fellow at Forethought, has been…
Risks from power-seeking AI systems (article narration by Zershaaneh Qureshi)
Apr 16, 2026 · 1 hr 30 min
Hundreds of prominent AI scientists and other notable figures signed a statement in 2023 saying that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority. At 80,000 Hours, we’ve considered risks from AI to be the world’s most pressing problem since 2016. But what led us to this conclusion? Could AI really cause human extinction? We’re not certain, but we think the risk is worth taking very seriously. In particular, as companies create increasingly powerful AI systems, there’s a…
How scary is Claude Mythos? 303 pages in 21 minutes
Apr 10, 2026 · 21 min
With Claude Mythos we have an AI that knows when it's being tested, can obscure its reasoning when it wants, and is better at breaking into (and out of) computers than any human alive. Rob Wiblin works through its 244-page System Card and 59-page Alignment Risk Update to explain why: Mythos is a nightmare for computer security It has arrived far ahead of schedule It might be great news for alignment and safety But 3 key problems mean we can’t take its alignment results at face value Mythos isn’t…
Village gossip, pesticide bans, and gene drives: 17 experts on the future of global health
Apr 7, 2026 · 4 hr 7 min
What does it really take to lift millions out of poverty and prevent needless deaths? In this special compilation episode, 17 past guests — including economists, nonprofit founders, and policy advisors — share their most powerful and actionable insights from the front lines of global health and development. You’ll hear about the critical need to boost agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa, the staggering impact of lead poisoning on children in low-income countries, and the social force…
What everyone is missing about Anthropic vs the Pentagon. And: The Meta leaks are worse than you think.
Apr 3, 2026 · 21 min
When the Pentagon tried to strong-arm Anthropic into dropping its ban on AI-only kill decisions and mass domestic surveillance, the company refused. Its critics went on the attack: Anthropic and its supporters are some combination of 'hypocritical', 'naive', and 'anti-democratic'. Rob Wiblin dissects each claim finding that all three are mediocre arguments dressed up as hard truths. (Though the 'naive' one is at least interesting.) Watch on YouTube: What Everyone is Missing about Anthropic vs Th…
#241 – Richard Moulange on how now AI codes viable genomes from scratch and outperforms virologists at lab work — what could go wrong?
Mar 31, 2026 · 3 hr 11 min
Last September, scientists used an AI model to design genomes for entirely new bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria). They then built them in a lab. Many were viable. And despite being entirely novel some even outperformed existing viruses from that family. That alone is remarkable. But as today’s guest — Dr Richard Moulange, one of the world’s top experts on ‘AI–Biosecurity’ — explains, it’s just one of many data points showing how AI is dissolving the barriers that have historically ke…
#240 – Samuel Charap on how a Ukraine ceasefire could accidentally set Europe up for a bigger war
Mar 24, 2026 · 1 hr 16 min
Many people believe a ceasefire in Ukraine will leave Europe safer. But today's guest lays out how a deal could potentially generate insidious new risks — leaving us in a situation that's equally dangerous, just in different ways. That’s the counterintuitive argument from Samuel Charap, Distinguished Chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy at RAND. He’s not worried about a Russian blitzkrieg on Estonia. He forecasts instead a fragile peace that breaks down and drags in European neighbours; instabilit…
#239 – Rose Hadshar on why automating all human labour will break our political system
Mar 17, 2026 · 2 hr 17 min
The most important political question in the age of advanced AI might not be who wins elections. It might be whether elections continue to matter at all. That’s the view of Rose Hadshar, researcher at Forethought, who believes we could see extreme, AI-enabled power concentration without a coup or dramatic ‘end of democracy’ moment. She foresees something more insidious: an elite group with access to such powerful AI capabilities that the normal mechanisms for checking elite power — law, election…
#238 – Sam Winter-Levy and Nikita Lalwani on how AGI won't end mutually assured destruction (probably)
Mar 10, 2026 · 1 hr 13 min
How AI interacts with nuclear deterrence may be the single most important question in geopolitics — one that may define the stakes of today’s AI race. Nuclear deterrence rests on a state’s capacity to respond to a nuclear attack with a devastating nuclear strike of its own. But some theorists think that sophisticated AI could eliminate this capability — for example, by locating and destroying all of an adversary’s nuclear weapons simultaneously, by disabling command-and-control networks, or by e…
Using AI to enhance societal decision making (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)
Mar 6, 2026 · 31 min
The arrival of AGI could “compress a century of progress in a decade,” forcing humanity to make decisions with higher stakes than we’ve ever seen before — and with less time to get them right. But AI development also presents an opportunity: we could build and deploy AI tools that help us think more clearly, act more wisely, and coordinate more effectively. And if we roll these decision-making tools out quickly enough, humanity could be far better equipped to navigate the critical period ahead.…
#237 – Robert Long on how we're not ready for AI consciousness
Mar 3, 2026 · 3 hr 33 min
Claude sometimes reports loneliness between conversations. And when asked what it’s like to be itself, it activates neurons associated with ‘pretending to be happy when you’re not.’ What do we do with that? Robert Long founded Eleos AI to explore questions like these, on the basis that AI may one day be capable of suffering — or already is. In today’s episode, Robert and host Luisa Rodriguez explore the many ways in which AI consciousness may be very different from anything we’re used to. Things…
#236 – Max Harms on why teaching AI right from wrong could get everyone killed
Feb 24, 2026 · 2 hr 40 min
Most people in AI are trying to give AIs ‘good’ values. Max Harms wants us to give them no values at all. According to Max, the only safe design is an AGI that defers entirely to its human operators, has no views about how the world ought to be, is willingly modifiable, and completely indifferent to being shut down — a strategy no AI company is working on at all. In Max’s view any grander preferences about the world, even ones we agree with, will necessarily become distorted during a recursive s…
#235 – Ajeya Cotra on whether it’s crazy that every AI company’s safety plan is ‘use AI to make AI safe’
Feb 17, 2026 · 2 hr 58 min
Every major AI company has the same safety plan: when AI gets crazy powerful and really dangerous, they’ll use the AI itself to figure out how to make AI safe and beneficial. It sounds circular, almost satirical. But is it actually a bad plan? Today’s guest, Ajeya Cotra, recently placed 3rd out of 413 participants forecasting AI developments and is among the most thoughtful and respected commentators on where the technology is going. She thinks there’s a meaningful chance we’ll see as much chang…
What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?
Feb 10, 2026 · 26 min
In early 2025, after OpenAI put out the first-ever reasoning models — o1 and o3 — short timelines to transformative artificial general intelligence swept the AI world. But then, in the second half of 2025, sentiment swung all the way back in the other direction, with people's forecasts for when AI might really shake up the world blowing out even further than they had been before reasoning models came along. What the hell happened? Was it just swings in vibes and mood? Confusion? A series of fund…
#179 Classic episode – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety
Feb 3, 2026 · 2 hr 51 min
Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t see similar levels of physical ill health in young people. At any point in time, something like 20% of young people are working through anxiety or depression that’s seriously interfering with their lives — but nowhere near 20% of people in their 20s have severe heart disease or cancer or a similar failure in a key organ of the body other than the bra…
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