Consistently Candid

After a long hiatus, I am resurrecting my podcast! For this episode, I spoke with Steven Adler. Steven worked on policy and safety at OpenAI between 2020 and 2024. He has since left to pursue independent writing to raise public awareness about AI risks and co-founded Guidelight AI, an organisation focused on scrutinising and improving safety practices at major AI companies. Guidelight was one of two organisations instrumental in spearheading the Pacing the Frontier open letter, which has garnered 1300+ signatories from employees at frontier labs. It has also published a scorecard of AI control practices across OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and xAI.

Topics covered in the episode:

• Why Steven left OpenAI in 2024 — o1, NDAs, safety staff turnover
• Counterarguments to AI pessimism, and where Steven's cruxes lie
• The OpenAI–Hugging Face incident and OpenAI's response
• AI control: monitoring, prevention, and whether it scales to superintelligence
• Why incident reporting is inadequate, and communicating risk when nothing visibly bad has happened
• Where AI policy stands: SB 53, RAISE, Illinois, the EU AI Act, and how weak enforcement is
• Companies quietly diluting their own safety commitments
• The Pacing the Frontier letter, what "pacing" means and how it's landing
• Guidelight's control scorecard: method, findings, and theory of change

Links:

Follow Steven on Twitter and subscribe to his Substack

The Pacing the Frontier open letter

Read Guidelight's AI control scorecard

In this episode, I chatted with Frances Lorenz, events associate at the Centre for Effective Altruism. We covered our respective paths into AI safety, the emotional impact of learning about x-risk, what it's like to be female in a male-dominated community and more!

Follow Frances on Twitter

Subscribe to her Substack

Apply for EAG London!

Gabe Alfour is a co-founder of Conjecture and an advisor to Control AI, both organisations working to reduce risks from advanced AI. 

We discussed why AI poses an existential risk to humanity, what makes this problem very hard to solve, why Gabe believes we need to prevent the development of superintelligence for at least the next two decades, and more. 

Follow Gabe on Twitter

Read The Compendium and A Narrow Path

A lot has happened in AI since the last time I spoke to Nathan Labenz of The Cognitive Revolution, so I invited him back on for a whistlestop tour of the most important developments we've seen over the last year!

We covered reasoning models, DeepSeek, the many spooky alignment failures we've observed in the last few months & much more!

Follow Nathan on Twitter

Listen to The Cognitive Revolution 

My Twitter & Substack 

The Fun Theory Sequence is one of Eliezer Yudkowsky's cheerier works, and considers questions such as 'how much fun is there in the universe?', 'are we having fun yet' and 'could we be having more fun?'. It tries to answer some of the philosophical quandries we might encounter when envisioning a post-AGI utopia.

In this episode, I discussed Fun Theory with Noah Topper, who loyal listeners will remember from episode 7, in which we tackled EY's equally interesting but less fun essay, A List of Lethalities.

Follow Noah on Twitter and check out his Substack!

John Sherman is the host of the For Humanity Podcast, which (much like this one!) aims to explain AI safety to a non-expert audience. In this episode, we compared our experiences of encountering AI safety arguments for the first time and the psychological experience of being aware of x-risk, as well as what messaging strategies the AI safety community should be using to engage more people.

Listen & subscribe to the For Humanity Podcast on YouTube and follow John on Twitter!

StopAI are a non-profit aiming to achieve a permanent ban on the development of AGI through peaceful protest. In this episode, I chatted with three of founders of StopAI – Remmelt Ellen, Sam Kirchner and Guido Reichstadter. We talked about what protest tactics StopAI have been using, and why they want a stop (and not just a pause!) in the development of AGI.

Follow Sam, Remmelt and Guido on Twitter

My Twitter 

Buck Shlegeris is the CEO of Redwood Research, a non-profit working to reduce risks from powerful AI. We discussed Redwood's research into AI control, why we shouldn't feel confident that witnessing an AI escape attempt would persuade labs to undeploy dangerous models, lessons from the vetoing of SB1047, the importance of lab security and more. 

Posts discussed:

• The case for ensuring that powerful AIs are controlled
• Would catching your AIs trying to escape convince AI developers to slow down or undeploy?
• You can, in fact, bamboozle an unaligned AI into sparing your life

Follow Buck on Twitter and subscribe to his Substack!

In this episode, Aaron Bergman and Max Alexander are back to battle it out for the philosophy crown, while I (attempt to) moderate. They discuss the Very Repugnant Conclusion, which, in the words of Claude, "posits that a world with a vast population living lives barely worth living could be considered ethically inferior to a world with an even larger population, where most people have extremely high quality lives, but a significant minority endure extreme suffering." Listen to the end to hear my uninformed opinion on who's right.

Read Aaron's blog post on suffering-focused utilitarianism

Follow Aaron on Twitter
Follow Max on Twitter
My Twitter

Deger Turan is the CEO of forecasting platform Metaculus and president of the AI Objectives Institute.

In this episode, we discuss how forecasting can be used to help humanity coordinate around reducing existential risks, Deger's advice for aspiring forecasters, the future of using AI for forecasting and more!

Enter Metaculus's Q3 AI Forecasting Benchmark Tournament

Get in touch with Deger: [email protected]