Shows / 80,000 Hours Podcast
80,000 Hours Podcast
The most important conversations about artificial intelligence you won’t hear anywhere else. Subscribe by searching for '80000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts. Hosted by Rob Wiblin, Luisa Rodriguez, Zershaaneh Qureshi, and Tom Reed.
Episodes
80,000 Hours PodcastLuke Muehlhauser on the most important AI safety work nobody is doing
The US government spends 25 times more on military marching bands than on its AI safety institute. And that’s just one of the many institutions we’re missing…
80,000 Hours PodcastWhy Silicon Valley can’t slow down AI on its own | Luisa Rodriguez
Two-thirds of Americans think AI is moving too fast. So do the people building it. So why the hell isn’t anyone slowing down? We can’t tell when models are too…
80,000 Hours PodcastTom Milton on how we could verify a US–China deal on AI
If the US and China agreed to pause frontier AI training, how would either side confirm the other was complying? Today, Tom Milton argues, the most likely…
80,000 Hours PodcastAI lab staff: Has your project been overtaken by events? 8 strategic updates | Rob Wiblin
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastIntroducing our new YouTube channel: Zershaaneh Talks AI
Our host Zershaaneh Qureshi has just launched a new YouTube channel: Zershaaneh Talks AI — featuring conversations about who should control AI, how to control…
80,000 Hours PodcastHow to get into AI safety in 3 months (article reading by career advisor Matt Beard)
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastOpenAI Security: Controlling Models is Now ‘Hell’ (AI Explained cross-post)
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastIn 2023 Ajeya Cotra already knew what was coming (classic episode)
We'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…
80,000 Hours Podcast19 Astra and 'Hugging Face' details that reveal what's coming next | Rob Wiblin
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#256 – Simon Goldstein on the case for giving AI (some) legal rights
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#255 – Will AI take power — or will humans use it to take power first? With Katja Grace and Tom Davidson
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastHow we get from AI cyberattacks to human extinction
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#254 – Max Nadeau on why ambitious people should start AI safety nonprofits
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastWhy the intelligence explosion can't happen inside a data centre | Tom Reed
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastInside the first AI-coordinated cyberattack on a real company
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#253 – AI 2027's author returns with a plan to change the ending | Daniel Kokotajlo
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#252 – Owain Evans on accidentally training AI models to be evil
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#251 – The UK's former head AI safety scientist on how to solve alignment before superintelligence arrives | Geoffrey Irving
When should governments slow the race toward superintelligence? According to Geoffrey Irving, the careful answer is sometime in the past. The useful answer is…
80,000 Hours Podcast#250 – Toby Ord on where AGI timelines go wrong
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastWhat the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2026? – Rob Wiblin
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#249 – Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#248 – Jasmine Sun on what the people building AI really believe
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#247 – Anton Leicht on how middle powers avoid losing everything in a post-AI world
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#246 – Sneha Revanur on how a small team of activists helped pass America's landmark AI safety laws
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastWe can guess what intergalactic war would look like. And strangely, it matters.
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastHow AI could create the world’s biggest problems (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#245 – Rohin Shah on what it's really like to run AGI safety at Google DeepMind (and where I disagree with 'doomers')
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastWhat makes for a dream job? | Benjamin Todd
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#244 – Benjamin Todd on how we’re updating our career advice for the strangest time in history
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastCan AIs already start 'rogue deployments' inside AI companies? (Landmark new METR report)
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#243 – 'Godfather of AI' Yoshua Bengio: "I now see a path" to safe superintelligent AI
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast'95% of AI Pilots Fail': The hidden agenda behind the viral stat that misled millions
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#242 – Will MacAskill on how we survive the 'intelligence explosion,' AI character, and the case for 'viatopia'
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastRisks from power-seeking AI systems (article narration by Zershaaneh Qureshi)
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastHow scary is Claude Mythos? 303 pages in 21 minutes
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)…
80,000 Hours PodcastVillage gossip, pesticide bans, and gene drives: 17 experts on the future of global health
What does it really take to lift millions out of poverty and prevent needless deaths? In this special compilation episode, 17 past guests — including…
80,000 Hours PodcastWhat everyone is missing about Anthropic vs the Pentagon. And: The Meta leaks are worse than you think.
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#241 – Richard Moulange on how now AI codes viable genomes from scratch and outperforms virologists at lab work — what could go wrong?
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#240 – Samuel Charap on how a Ukraine ceasefire could accidentally set Europe up for a bigger war
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 —…
80,000 Hours Podcast#239 – Rose Hadshar on why automating all human labour will break our political system
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#238 – Sam Winter-Levy and Nikita Lalwani on how AGI won't end mutually assured destruction (probably)
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastUsing AI to enhance societal decision making (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#237 – Robert Long on how we're not ready for AI consciousness
Claude sometimes reports loneliness between conversations. And when asked what it’s like to be itself, it activates neurons associated with ‘pretending to be…
80,000 Hours Podcast#236 – Max Harms on why teaching AI right from wrong could get everyone killed
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#235 – Ajeya Cotra on whether it’s crazy that every AI company’s safety plan is ‘use AI to make AI safe’
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastWhat the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?
In early 2025, after OpenAI put out the first-ever reasoning models — o1 and o3 — short timelines to transformative artificial general intelligence swept the…
80,000 Hours Podcast#179 Classic episode – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#234 – David Duvenaud on why 'aligned AI' would still kill democracy
Democracy might be a brief historical blip. That’s the unsettling thesis of a recent paper, which argues AI that can do all the work a human can do inevitably…
80,000 Hours Podcast#145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give people of…
80,000 Hours Podcast#233 – James Smith on how to prevent a mirror life catastrophe
When James Smith first heard about mirror bacteria, he was sceptical. But within two weeks, he’d dropped everything to work on it full time, considering it the…
80,000 Hours Podcast#144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is a fundamental universal phenomena
What’s the opposite of cancer? If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym section at…
80,000 Hours Podcast#142 Classic episode – John McWhorter on why the optimal number of languages might be one, and other provocative claims about language
John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He's also a content-producing machine, never…
80,000 Hours Podcast2025 Highlight-o-thon: Oops! All Bests
It’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode we recorded this year, including: Kyle Fish…
80,000 Hours Podcast#232 – Andreas Mogensen on what we owe 'philosophical Vulcans' and unconscious beings
Most debates about the moral status of AI systems circle the same question: is there something that it feels like to be them? But what if that’s the wrong…
80,000 Hours Podcast#231 – Paul Scharre on how AI-controlled robots will and won't change war
In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet lieutenant colonel, sat in a bunker watching a red screen flash “MISSILE LAUNCH.” Protocol demanded he report it to…
80,000 Hours PodcastAI might let a few people control everything — permanently (article by Rose Hadshar)
Power is already concentrated today: over 800 million people live on less than $3 a day, the three richest men in the world are worth over $1 trillion, and…
80,000 Hours Podcast#230 – Dean Ball on how AI is a huge deal — but we shouldn’t regulate it yet
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#229 – Marius Hobbhahn on the race to solve AI scheming before models go superhuman
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…
80,000 Hours PodcastRob & Luisa chat kids, the 2016 fertility crash, and how the 50s invented parenting that makes us miserable
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…
80,000 Hours Podcast#228 – Eileen Yam on how we're completely out of touch with what the public thinks about AI
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…