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, video, highlights, and full transcript: https://80k.info/to25

As he explains, until recently anyone can access the best AI in the world “for less than the price of a can of Coke.” But unfortunately, that’s over.

What changed? AI companies first made models smarter by throwing a million times as much computing power at them during training, to make them better at predicting the next word. But with high quality data drying up, that approach petered out in 2024.

So they pivoted to something radically different: instead of training smarter models, they’re giving existing models dramatically more time to think — leading to the rise in “reasoning models” that are at the frontier today.

The results are impressive but this extra computing time comes at a cost: OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model achieved stunning results on a famous AI test by writing an Encyclopedia Britannica’s worth of reasoning to solve individual problems at a cost of over $1,000 per question.

This isn’t just technical trivia: if this improvement method sticks, it will change much about how the AI revolution plays out, starting with the fact that we can expect the rich and powerful to get access to the best AI models well before the rest of us.

Toby and host Rob discuss the implications of all that, plus the return of reinforcement learning (and resulting increase in deception), and Toby's commitment to clarifying the misleading graphs coming out of AI companies — to separate the snake oil and fads from the reality of what's likely a "transformative moment in human history."

Recorded on May 23, 2025.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Toby Ord is back — for a 4th time! (00:01:20)
• Everything has changed (and changed again) since 2020 (00:01:37)
• Is x-risk up or down? (00:07:47)
• The new scaling era: compute at inference (00:09:12)
• Inference scaling means less concentration (00:31:21)
• Will rich people get access to AGI first? Will the rest of us even know? (00:35:11)
• The new regime makes 'compute governance' harder (00:41:08)
• How 'IDA' might let AI blast past human level — or not (00:50:14)
• Reinforcement learning brings back 'reward hacking' agents (01:04:56)
• Will we get warning shots? Will they even help? (01:14:41)
• The scaling paradox (01:22:09)
• Misleading charts from AI companies (01:30:55)
• Policy debates should dream much bigger (01:43:04)
• Scientific moratoriums have worked before (01:56:04)
• Might AI 'go rogue' early on? (02:13:16)
• Lamps are regulated much more than AI (02:20:55)
• Companies made a strategic error shooting down SB 1047 (02:29:57)
• Companies should build in emergency brakes for their AI (02:35:49)
• Toby's bottom lines (02:44:32)

Tell us what you thought! https://forms.gle/enUSk8HXiCrqSA9J8

Video editing: Simon Monsour
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Music: Ben Cordell
Camera operator: Jeremy Chevillotte
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore

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 already gone.

Links to learn more, video, highlights, and full transcript: https://80k.info/hw

“Trump has very little trouble accepting other great powers as co-equals,” Hugh explains. And that happens to align perfectly with a strategic reality the foreign policy establishment desperately wants to ignore: fundamental shifts in global power have made the costs of maintaining a US-led hegemony prohibitively high.

Even under Biden, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the US sent weapons but explicitly ruled out direct involvement. Ukraine matters far more to Russia than America, and this “asymmetry of resolve” makes Putin’s nuclear threats credible where America’s counterthreats simply aren’t. Hugh’s gloomy prediction: “Europeans will end up conceding to Russia whatever they can’t convince the Russians they’re willing to fight a nuclear war to deny them.”

The Pacific tells the same story. Despite Obama’s “pivot to Asia” and Biden’s tough talk about “winning the competition for the 21st century,” actual US military capabilities there have barely budged while China’s have soared, along with its economy — which is now bigger than the US’s, as measured in purchasing power. Containing China and defending Taiwan would require America to spend 8% of GDP on defence (versus 3.5% today) — and convince Beijing it’s willing to accept Los Angeles being vaporised.

Unlike during the Cold War, no president — Trump or otherwise — can make that case to voters.

Our new “multipolar” future, split between American, Chinese, Russian, Indian, and European spheres of influence, is a “darker world” than the golden age of US dominance. But Hugh’s message is blunt: for better or worse, 35 years of American hegemony are over.

Recorded 30/5/2025.

Chapters:

• 00:00:00 Cold open
• 00:01:25 US dominance is already gone
• 00:03:26 US hegemony was the weird aberration
• 00:13:08 Why the US bothered being the 'new Rome'
• 00:23:25 Evidence the US is accepting the multipolar global order
• 00:36:41 How Trump is advancing the inevitable
• 00:43:21 Rubio explicitly favours this outcome
• 00:45:42 Trump is half-right that the US was being ripped off
• 00:50:14 It doesn't matter if the next president feels differently
• 00:56:17 China's population is shrinking, but it doesn't matter
• 01:06:07 Why Hugh disagrees with other realists like Mearsheimer
• 01:10:52 Could the US be persuaded to spend 2x on defence?
• 01:16:22 A multipolar world is bad, but better than nuclear war
• 01:21:46 Will the US invade Panama? Greenland? Canada?!
• 01:32:01 What should everyone else do to protect themselves in this new world?
• 01:39:41 Europe is strong enough to take on Russia
• 01:44:03 But the EU will need nuclear weapons
• 01:48:34 Cancel (some) orders for US fighter planes
• 01:53:40 Taiwan is screwed, even with its AI chips
• 02:04:12 South Korea has to go nuclear too
• 02:08:08 Japan will go nuclear, but can't be a regional leader
• 02:11:44 Australia is defensible but needs a totally different military
• 02:17:19 AGI may or may not overcome existing nuclear deterrence
• 02:34:24 How right is realism?
• 02:40:17 Has a country ever gone to war over morality alone?
• 02:44:45 Hugh's message for Americans
• 02:47:12 Why America temporarily stopped being isolationist

Tell us what you thought! https://forms.gle/AM91VzL4BDroEe6AA

Video editing: Simon Monsour
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Music: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore

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 organisation measuring these capabilities.

Links to learn more, video, highlights, and full transcript: https://80k.info/bb

Beth's team has been timing how long it takes skilled humans to complete projects of varying length, then seeing how AI models perform on the same work. The resulting paper “Measuring AI ability to complete long tasks” made waves by revealing that the planning horizon of AI models was doubling roughly every seven months. It's regarded by many as the most useful AI forecasting work in years.

Beth has found models can already do “meaningful work” improving themselves, and she wouldn’t be surprised if AI models were able to autonomously self-improve as little as two years from now — in fact, “It seems hard to rule out even shorter [timelines]. Is there 1% chance of this happening in six, nine months? Yeah, that seems pretty plausible.”

Beth adds:

What did you think of this episode? https://forms.gle/sFuDkoznxBcHPVmX6

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Who is Beth Barnes? (00:01:19)
• Can we see AI scheming in the chain of thought? (00:01:52)
• The chain of thought is essential for safety checking (00:08:58)
• Alignment faking in large language models (00:12:24)
• We have to test model honesty even before they're used inside AI companies (00:16:48)
• We have to test models when unruly and unconstrained (00:25:57)
• Each 7 months models can do tasks twice as long (00:30:40)
• METR's research finds AIs are solid at AI research already (00:49:33)
• AI may turn out to be strong at novel and creative research (00:55:53)
• When can we expect an algorithmic 'intelligence explosion'? (00:59:11)
• Recursively self-improving AI might even be here in two years — which is alarming (01:05:02)
• Could evaluations backfire by increasing AI hype and racing? (01:11:36)
• Governments first ignore new risks, but can overreact once they arrive (01:26:38)
• Do we need external auditors doing AI safety tests, not just the companies themselves? (01:35:10)
• A case against safety-focused people working at frontier AI companies (01:48:44)
• The new, more dire situation has forced changes to METR's strategy (02:02:29)
• AI companies are being locally reasonable, but globally reckless (02:10:31)
• Overrated: Interpretability research (02:15:11)
• Underrated: Developing more narrow AIs (02:17:01)
• Underrated: Helping humans judge confusing model outputs (02:23:36)
• Overrated: Major AI companies' contributions to safety research (02:25:52)
• Could we have a science of translating AI models' nonhuman language or neuralese? (02:29:24)
• Could we ban using AI to enhance AI, or is that just naive? (02:31:47)
• Open-weighting models is often good, and Beth has changed her attitude to it (02:37:52)
• What we can learn about AGI from the nuclear arms race (02:42:25)
• Infosec is so bad that no models are truly closed-weight models (02:57:24)
• AI is more like bioweapons because it undermines the leading power (03:02:02)
• What METR can do best that others can't (03:12:09)
• What METR isn't doing that other people have to step up and do (03:27:07)
• What research METR plans to do next (03:32:09)

This episode was originally recorded on February 17, 2025.

Video editing: Luke Monsour and Simon Monsour
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Music: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore

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 under deep uncertainty.

Links to learn more and full transcript: https://80k.info/nhs

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Luisa's intro (00:00:57)
• Robert Long on what we should picture when we think about artificial sentience (00:02:49)
• Jeff Sebo on what the threshold is for AI systems meriting moral consideration (00:07:22)
• Meghan Barrett on the evolutionary argument for insect sentience (00:11:24)
• Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on whether there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp (00:15:09)
• Jonathan Birch on the cautionary tale of newborn pain (00:21:53)
• David Chalmers on why artificial consciousness is possible (00:26:12)
• Holden Karnofsky on how we’ll see digital people as... people (00:32:18)
• Jeff Sebo on grappling with our biases and ignorance when thinking about sentience (00:38:59)
• Bob Fischer on how to think about the moral weight of a chicken (00:49:37)
• Cameron Meyer Shorb on the range of suffering in wild animals (01:01:41)
• Sébastien Moro on whether fish are conscious or sentient (01:11:17)
• David Chalmers on when to start worrying about artificial consciousness (01:16:36)
• Robert Long on how we might stumble into causing AI systems enormous suffering (01:21:04)
• Jonathan Birch on how we might accidentally create artificial sentience (01:26:13)
• Anil Seth on which parts of the brain are required for consciousness (01:32:33)
• Peter Godfrey-Smith on uploads of ourselves (01:44:47)
• Jonathan Birch on treading lightly around the “edge cases” of sentience (02:00:12)
• Meghan Barrett on whether brain size and sentience are related (02:05:25)
• Lewis Bollard on how animal advocacy has changed in response to sentience studies (02:12:01)
• Bob Fischer on using proxies to determine sentience (02:22:27)
• Cameron Meyer Shorb on how we can practically study wild animals’ subjective experiences (02:26:28)
• Jeff Sebo on the problem of false positives in assessing artificial sentience (02:33:16)
• Stuart Russell on the moral rights of AIs (02:38:31)
• Buck Shlegeris on whether AI control strategies make humans the bad guys (02:41:50)
• Meghan Barrett on why she can’t be totally confident about insect sentience (02:47:12)
• Bob Fischer on what surprised him most about the findings of the Moral Weight Project (02:58:30)
• Jeff Sebo on why we’re likely to sleepwalk into causing massive amounts of suffering in AI systems (03:02:46)
• Will MacAskill on the rights of future digital beings (03:05:29)
• Carl Shulman on sharing the world with digital minds (03:19:25)
• Luisa's outro (03:33:43)

Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Milo McGuire
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore

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 corporation (PBC) — and this alone will dramatically weaken the nonprofit’s ability to direct the business in pursuit of its charitable purpose: ensuring AGI is safe and “benefits all of humanity.”

Right now, the nonprofit directly controls the business. But were OpenAI to become a PBC, the nonprofit, rather than having its “hand on the lever,” would merely contribute to the decision of who does.

Why does this matter? Today, if OpenAI’s commercial arm were about to release an unhinged AI model that might make money but be bad for humanity, the nonprofit could directly intervene to stop it. In the proposed new structure, it likely couldn’t do much at all.

But it’s even worse than that: even if the nonprofit could select the PBC’s directors, those directors would have fundamentally different legal obligations from those of the nonprofit. A PBC director must balance public benefit with the interests of profit-driven shareholders — by default, they cannot legally prioritise public interest over profits, even if they and the controlling shareholder that appointed them want to do so.

As Tyler points out, there isn’t a single reported case of a shareholder successfully suing to enforce a PBC’s public benefit mission in the 10+ years since the Delaware PBC statute was enacted.

This extra step from the nonprofit to the PBC would also mean that the attorneys general of California and Delaware — who today are empowered to ensure the nonprofit pursues its mission — would find themselves powerless to act. These are probably not side effects but rather a Trojan horse for-profit investors are trying to slip past regulators.

Fortunately this can all be addressed — but it requires either the nonprofit board or the attorneys general of California and Delaware to promptly put their foot down and insist on watertight legal agreements that preserve OpenAI’s current governance safeguards and enforcement mechanisms.

As Tyler explains, the same arrangements that currently bind the OpenAI business have to be written into a new PBC’s certificate of incorporation — something that won’t happen by default and that powerful investors have every incentive to resist.

Full transcript and links to learn more: https://80k.info/tw

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Who’s Tyler Whitmer? (00:01:35)
• The new plan may be no improvement (00:02:04)
• The public hasn't even been allowed to know what they are owed (00:06:55)
• Issues beyond control (00:11:02)
• The new directors wouldn’t have to pursue the current purpose (00:12:06)
• The nonprofit might not even retain voting control (00:16:58)
• The attorneys general could lose their enforcement oversight (00:22:11)
• By default things go badly (00:29:09)
• How to keep the mission in the restructure (00:32:25)
• What will become of OpenAI’s Charter? (00:37:11)
• Ways to make things better, and not just avoid them getting worse (00:42:38)
• How the AGs can avoid being disempowered (00:48:35)
• Retaining the power to fire the CEO (00:54:49)
• Will the current board get a financial stake in OpenAI? (00:57:40)
• Could the AGs insist the current nonprofit agreement be made public? (00:59:15)
• How OpenAI is valued should be transparent and scrutinised (01:01:00)
• Investors aren't bad people, but they can't be trusted either (01:06:05)

This episode was originally recorded on May 13, 2025.

Video editing: Simon Monsour and Luke Monsour
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Music: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore

More and more people have been saying that we might have AGI (artificial general intelligence) before 2030. Is that really plausible? 

This article by Benjamin Todd looks into the cases for and against, and summarises the key things you need to know to understand the debate. You can see all the images and many footnotes in the original article on the 80,000 Hours website.

In a nutshell:

• Four key factors are driving AI progress: larger base models, teaching models to reason, increasing models’ thinking time, and building agent scaffolding for multi-step tasks. These are underpinned by increasing computational power to run and train AI systems, as well as increasing human capital going into algorithmic research.
• All of these drivers are set to continue until 2028 and perhaps until 2032.
• This means we should expect major further gains in AI performance. We don’t know how large they’ll be, but extrapolating recent trends on benchmarks suggests we’ll reach systems with beyond-human performance in coding and scientific reasoning, and that can autonomously complete multi-week projects.
• Whether we call these systems ’AGI’ or not, they could be sufficient to enable AI research itself, robotics, the technology industry, and scientific research to accelerate — leading to transformative impacts.
• Alternatively, AI might fail to overcome issues with ill-defined, high-context work over long time horizons and remain a tool (even if much improved compared to today).
• Increasing AI performance requires exponential growth in investment and the research workforce. At current rates, we will likely start to reach bottlenecks around 2030. Simplifying a bit, that means we’ll likely either reach AGI by around 2030 or see progress slow significantly. Hybrid scenarios are also possible, but the next five years seem especially crucial.

Chapters:

• Introduction (00:00:00)
• The case for AGI by 2030 (00:00:33)
• The article in a nutshell (00:04:04)
• Section 1: What's driven recent AI progress? (00:05:46)
• How we got here: the deep learning era (00:05:52)
• Where are we now: the four key drivers (00:07:45)
• Driver 1: Scaling pretraining (00:08:57)
• Algorithmic efficiency (00:12:14)
• How much further can pretraining scale? (00:14:22)
• Driver 2: Training the models to reason (00:16:15)
• How far can scaling reasoning continue? (00:22:06)
• Driver 3: Increasing how long models think (00:25:01)
• Driver 4: Building better agents (00:28:00)
• How far can agent improvements continue? (00:33:40)
• Section 2: How good will AI become by 2030? (00:35:59)
• Trend extrapolation of AI capabilities (00:37:42)
• What jobs would these systems help with? (00:39:59)
• Software engineering (00:40:50)
• Scientific research (00:42:13)
• AI research (00:43:21)
• What's the case against this? (00:44:30)
• Additional resources on the sceptical view (00:49:18)
• When do the 'experts' expect AGI? (00:49:50)
• Section 3: Why the next 5 years are crucial (00:51:06)
• Bottlenecks around 2030 (00:52:10)
• Two potential futures for AI (00:56:02)
• Conclusion (00:58:05)
• Thanks for listening (00:59:27)

Audio engineering: Dominic Armstrong
Music: Ben Cordell

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 consequential confrontation behind closed doors. A confrontation perhaps driven by public pressure from Nobel Prize winners, past OpenAI staff, and community organisations.

But whether this change will help depends entirely on the details of implementation — details that remain worryingly vague in the company’s announcement.

Return guest Rose Chan Loui, nonprofit law expert at UCLA, sees potential in OpenAI’s new proposal, but emphasises that “control” must be carefully defined and enforced: “The words are great, but what’s going to back that up?” Without explicitly defining the nonprofit’s authority over safety decisions, the shift could be largely cosmetic.

Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/rcl4

Why have state officials taken such an interest so far? Host Rob Wiblin notes, “OpenAI was proposing that the AGs would no longer have any say over what this super momentous company might end up doing. … It was just crazy how they were suggesting that they would take all of the existing money and then pursue a completely different purpose.”

Now that they’re in the picture, the AGs have leverage to ensure the nonprofit maintains genuine control over issues of public safety as OpenAI develops increasingly powerful AI.

Rob and Rose explain three key areas where the AGs can make a huge difference to whether this plays out in the public’s best interest:

1. Ensuring that the contractual agreements giving the nonprofit control over the new Delaware public benefit corporation are watertight, and don’t accidentally shut the AGs out of the picture.
2. Insisting that a majority of board members are truly independent by prohibiting indirect as well as direct financial stakes in the business.
3. Insisting that the board is empowered with the money, independent staffing, and access to information which they need to do their jobs.

This episode was originally recorded on May 6, 2025.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Rose is back! (00:01:06)
• The nonprofit will stay 'in control' (00:01:28)
• Backlash to OpenAI’s original plans (00:08:22)
• The new proposal (00:16:33)
• Giving up the super-profits (00:20:52)
• Can the nonprofit maintain control of the company? (00:24:49)
• Could for profit investors sue if profits aren't prioritised? (00:33:01)
• The 6 governance safeguards at risk with the restructure (00:34:33)
• Will the nonprofit’s giving just be corporate PR for the for-profit? (00:49:12)
• Is this good, or not? (00:51:06)
• Ways this could still go wrong – but reasons for optimism (00:54:19)

Video editing: Simon Monsour and Luke Monsour
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Music: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore

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 to solve its key problems stems primarily from bad incentives and bad processes.

Even brilliant, well-intentioned people are set up to fail by a long list of institutional absurdities that Ian runs through — from the constant churn of ministers and civil servants that means no one understands what they’re working on, to the “pathological national sentimentality” that keeps 10 Downing Street (a 17th century townhouse) as the beating heart of British government.

While some of these are unique British failings, we see similar dynamics in other governments and large corporations around the world.

But Ian also lays out how some countries have found structural solutions that help ensure decisions are made by the right people, with the information they need, and that success is rewarded.

Links to learn more, video, highlights, and full transcript.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• How Ian got obsessed with Britain's endless failings (00:01:05)
• Should we blame individuals or incentives? (00:03:24)
• The UK left its allies to be murdered in Afghanistan (to save cats and dogs) (00:09:02)
• The UK is governed from a tiny cramped house (00:17:54)
• “It's the stupidest conceivable system for how to run a country” (00:23:30)
• The problems that never get solved in the UK (00:28:14)
• Why UK ministers have no expertise in the areas they govern (00:31:32)
• Why MPs are chosen to have no idea about legislation (00:44:08)
• Is any country doing things better? (00:46:14)
• Is rushing inevitable or artificial? (00:57:20)
• How unelected septuagenarians are the heroes of UK governance (01:01:02)
• How Thatcher unintentionally made one part of parliament work (01:10:48)
• Maybe secrecy is the best disinfectant for incompetence (01:14:17)
• The House of Commons may as well be in a coma (01:22:34)
• Why it's in the PM's interest to ban electronic voting (01:33:13)
• MPs are deliberately kept ignorant of parliamentary procedure (01:35:53)
• “Whole areas of law have fallen almost completely into the vortex” (01:40:37)
• What's the seed of all this going wrong? (01:44:00)
• Why won't the Commons challenge the executive when it can? (01:53:10)
• Better ways to choose MPs (01:58:33)
• Citizens’ juries (02:07:16)
• Do more independent-minded legislatures actually lead to better outcomes? (02:10:42)
• "There’s no time for this bourgeois constitutional reform bulls***" (02:16:50)
• How to keep expert civil servants (02:22:35)
• Improving legislation like you’d improve Netflix dramas (02:34:34)
• MPs waste much of their time helping constituents with random complaints (02:39:59)
• Party culture prevents independent thinking (02:43:52)
• Would a written constitution help or hurt? (02:48:37)
• Can we give the PM room to appoint ministers based on expertise and competence? (02:51:51)
• Would proportional representation help? (02:56:20)
• Proportional representation encourages collaboration but does have weaknesses (02:58:51)
• Alternative electoral systems (03:07:44)

This episode was originally recorded on January 30, 2025.

Video editing: Simon Monsour
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Music: Ben Cordell
Camera operator: Jeremy Chevillotte
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore

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.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Luisa's intro (00:01:04)
• Holden Karnofsky on just kicking ass at whatever (00:02:53)
• Jeff Sebo on what improv comedy can teach us about doing good in the world (00:12:23)
• Dean Spears on being open to randomness and serendipity (00:19:26)
• Michael Webb on how to think about career planning given the rapid developments in AI (00:21:17)
• Michelle Hutchinson on finding what motivates you and reaching out to people for help (00:41:10)
• Benjamin Todd on figuring out if a career path is a good fit for you (00:46:03)
• Chris Olah on the value of unusual combinations of skills (00:50:23)
• Holden Karnofsky on deciding which weird ideas are worth betting on (00:58:03)
• Karen Levy on travelling to learn about yourself (01:03:10)
• Leah Garcés on finding common ground with unlikely allies (01:06:53)
• Spencer Greenberg on recognising toxic people who could derail your career and life (01:13:34)
• Holden Karnofsky on the many jobs that can help with AI (01:23:13)
• Danny Hernandez on using world events to trigger you to work on something else (01:30:46)
• Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on exploring and pivoting in careers (01:33:07)
• Benjamin Todd on making tough career decisions (01:38:36)
• Hannah Ritchie on being selective when following others’ advice (01:44:22)
• Alex Lawsen on getting good mentorship (01:47:25)
• Chris Olah on cold emailing that actually works (01:54:49)
• Pardis Sabeti on prioritising physical health to do your best work (01:58:34)
• Chris Olah on developing good taste and technique as a researcher (02:04:39)
• Benjamin Todd on why it’s so important to apply to loads of jobs (02:09:52)
• Varsha Venugopal on embracing uncomfortable situations and celebrating failures (02:14:25)
• Luisa's outro (02:17:43)

Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Content editing: Katy Moore and Milo McGuire
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore

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 — claims in a new paper published today that advanced AI enables power grabs by small groups, by removing the need for widespread human participation.

Links to learn more, video, highlights, and full transcript. https://80k.info/td

Also: come work with us on the 80,000 Hours podcast team! https://80k.info/work

There are a few routes by which small groups might seize power:

• Military coups: Though rare in established democracies due to citizen/soldier resistance, future AI-controlled militaries may lack such constraints. 
• Self-built hard power: History suggests maybe only 10,000 obedient military drones could seize power.
• Autocratisation: Leaders using millions of loyal AI workers, while denying others access, could remove democratic checks and balances.

Tom explains several reasons why AI systems might follow a tyrant’s orders:

• They might be programmed to obey the top of the chain of command, with no checks on that power.
• Systems could contain "secret loyalties" inserted during development.
• Superior cyber capabilities could allow small groups to control AI-operated military infrastructure.

Host Rob Wiblin and Tom discuss all this plus potential countermeasures.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• A major update on the show (00:00:55)
• How AI enables tiny groups to seize power (00:06:24)
• The 3 different threats (00:07:42)
• Is this common sense or far-fetched? (00:08:51)
• “No person rules alone.” Except now they might. (00:11:48)
• Underpinning all 3 threats: Secret AI loyalties (00:17:46)
• Key risk factors (00:25:38)
• Preventing secret loyalties in a nutshell (00:27:12)
• Are human power grabs more plausible than 'rogue AI'? (00:29:32)
• If you took over the US, could you take over the whole world? (00:38:11)
• Will this make it impossible to escape autocracy? (00:42:20)
• Threat 1: AI-enabled military coups (00:46:19)
• Will we sleepwalk into an AI military coup? (00:56:23)
• Could AIs be more coup-resistant than humans? (01:02:28)
• Threat 2: Autocratisation (01:05:22)
• Will AGI be super-persuasive? (01:15:32)
• Threat 3: Self-built hard power (01:17:56)
• Can you stage a coup with 10,000 drones? (01:25:42)
• That sounds a lot like sci-fi... is it credible? (01:27:49)
• Will we foresee and prevent all this? (01:32:08)
• Are people psychologically willing to do coups? (01:33:34)
• Will a balance of power between AIs prevent this? (01:37:39)
• Will whistleblowers or internal mistrust prevent coups? (01:39:55)
• Would other countries step in? (01:46:03)
• Will rogue AI preempt a human power grab? (01:48:30)
• The best reasons not to worry (01:51:05)
• How likely is this in the US? (01:53:23)
• Is a small group seizing power really so bad? (02:00:47)
• Countermeasure 1: Block internal misuse (02:04:19)
• Countermeasure 2: Cybersecurity (02:14:02)
• Countermeasure 3: Model spec transparency (02:16:11)
• Countermeasure 4: Sharing AI access broadly (02:25:23)
• Is it more dangerous to concentrate or share AGI? (02:30:13)
• Is it important to have more than one powerful AI country? (02:32:56)
• In defence of open sourcing AI models (02:35:59)
• 2 ways to stop secret AI loyalties (02:43:34)
• Preventing AI-enabled military coups in particular (02:56:20)
• How listeners can help (03:01:59)
• How to help if you work at an AI company (03:05:49)
• The power ML researchers still have, for now (03:09:53)
• How to help if you're an elected leader (03:13:14)
• Rob’s outro (03:19:05)

This episode was originally recorded on January 20, 2025.

Video editing: Simon Monsour
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Camera operator: Jeremy Chevillotte
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore