EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

About AIM

Ambitious Impact (AIM), formerly Charity Entrepreneurship, launches organizations that cost-effectively improve human and animal lives at scale.

Since 2018, we’ve incubated over 50 charities, now estimated to improve the lives of more than 75 million people and 1 billion animals worldwide. Our alumni have been backed by GiveWell, Open Philanthropy, the Gates Foundation, and Animal Charity Evaluators.

We believe that talented, dedicated entrepreneurs can solve the world's biggest problems using evidence, innovation, and a focus on cost-effective impact.

Our Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program currently launches ~10 nonprofits per year. In 2026, we aim to double this to 20. Our biggest bottleneck? Finding the best people and the best ideas.

That's where you come in.

Roles: Research Managers & Recruitment Manager

We’re hiring across two pivotal teams:

• Research Managers – Identify and evaluate the most promising, evidence-based ideas for new high-impact charities.
• Recruitment Manager – Find [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) About AIM

(01:10) Roles: Research Managers & Recruitment Manager

(01:50) Key Details

(02:36) About the Research Roles

(04:19) About the Recruitment Role

(06:03) What We Offer

(06:49) Want to learn more?

(07:05) Apply Now

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First published:

October 10th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8oHjh4ttMdaRqiZaZ/ambitious-impact-aim-is-hiring-for-research-and-recruitment

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

A conversation with Paul Scharre, author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, who joins us to talk about

• how AI's superhuman command and control abilities will change the battlefield
• why offense/defense balance isn’t a well-defined concept
• “race to the bottom” dynamics for autonomous weapons
• how a US/taiwan conlict in the age of drones might play out
• and more…

Transcript

Rai Sur 00:00:36

Today we’re speaking with Paul Scharre. Paul is the Executive Vice President at the Center for a New American Security and the author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. He also formerly worked at the Pentagon on emerging technologies. Welcome, Paul.

Paul Scharre 00:00:52

Thanks for having me.

Rai Sur 00:00:53

We’re also joined by Sentinel forecaster and co-founder Nuno Sempere, Sentinel Superforecaster Lisa, and Superforecaster Scott Eastman, whose specialty is in geopolitics, epidemiology [...]

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First published:

October 9th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4DeWPdPeBmJsEGJJn/interview-with-a-drone-expert-on-the-future-of-ai-warfare

Linkpost URL:
https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/how-strategic-ai-will-revolutionize

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This post is based on a memo I wrote for this year's Meta Coordination Forum. See also Arden Koehler's recent post, which hits a lot of similar notes.

Summary

The EA movement stands at a crossroads. In light of AI's very rapid progress, and the rise of the AI safety movement, some people view EA as a legacy movement set to fade away; others think we should refocus much more on “classic” cause areas like global health and animal welfare.

I argue for a third way: EA should embrace the mission of making the transition to a post-AGI society go well, significantly expanding our cause area focus beyond traditional AI safety. This means working on neglected areas like AI welfare, AI character, AI persuasion and epistemic disruption, human power concentration, space governance, and more (while continuing work on global health, animal welfare, AI safety, and biorisk).

These additional [...]

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Outline:

(00:20) Summary

(02:38) Three possible futures for the EA movement

(07:07) Reason #1: Neglected cause areas

(10:49) Reason #2: EA is currently intellectually adrift

(13:08) Reason #3: The benefits of EA mindset for AI safety and biorisk

(14:53) This isn't particularly Will-idiosyncratic

(15:57) Some related issues

(16:10) Principles-first EA

(17:30) Cultivating vs growing EA

(21:27) PR mentality

(24:48) What I'm not saying

(28:31) What to do?

(29:00) Local groups

(31:26) Online

(35:18) Conferences

(36:05) Conclusion

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First published:

October 10th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/R8AAG4QBZi5puvogR/effective-altruism-in-the-age-of-agi

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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We think there are many impactful roles out there that aren’t sufficiently on people's radar, to the detriment of both people looking to get hired and orgs looking to hire them. Because of that, we’ve been working to significantly scale and improve our job board, especially in the context of underrepresented opportunities (across cause areas, regions, and orgs that we think are currently not getting enough attention in EA).

So far, we’ve prioritized increasing the number and diversity of roles (to 800+, up around 3x what we originally had). We plan to keep adding a lot more roles, and also improving the functionality of the board in various ways (with email alerts as a top priority at the moment).

Here's how you can help us help you:

• If you land a role that you found on the job board, please let us know! (Or even if you're finding roles [...]

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First published:

October 9th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WgfzxAByug2mNbJFF/we-re-scaling-our-job-board-to-help-people-find-impactful

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

When will artificial intelligence (AI) match top human forecasters at predicting the future? In a recent podcast episode, Nate Silver predicted 10–15 years. Tyler Cowen disagreed, expecting a 1–2 year timeline. Who's more likely to be right?

Today, the Forecasting Research Institute is excited to release an update to ForecastBench—our benchmark tracking how well large language models (LLMs) forecast real-world events—with evidence that bears directly on this debate. We’re also opening the benchmark for submissions.

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First published:

October 8th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5vB2xGgXf7kAAbsF9/how-well-can-large-language-models-predict-the-future

Linkpost URL:
https://forecastingresearch.substack.com/p/ai-llm-forecasting-model-forecastbench-benchmark

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

(Context: I’m not an expert in animal welfare. My aim is to sketch a potentially neglected perspective on prioritization, not to give highly reliable object-level advice.)

Summary

We seem to be clueless about our long-term impact. We might therefore consider it more robust to focus on neartermist causes, in particular animal welfare.[1] But if we also take seriously our deep uncertainty about our impact on animals, what implications does this have for animal welfare prioritization?

This post will explain:

• why I think we could be clueless about even the near-term impact of many animal welfare interventions (more);
• what criteria I think an intervention must satisfy to be robust to near-term cluelessness (more); and
• how these criteria compare to existing approaches to robustness (more).

Practical takeaways for cost-effectiveness analyses:

• Include estimates of key backfire effects (more), such as:
  • large increases in populations of wild animals with net-negative [...]

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Outline:

(00:22) Summary

(02:28) Introduction

(06:59) Principles for a cluelessness-robust intervention

(07:11) 1. Accounts for robust backfire effects

(07:30) Example

(09:07) More detail

(12:53) 2. Doesn't depend on arbitrary estimates

(12:58) Example

(14:50) More detail

(18:00) 3. Accounts for unknown unknowns

(18:05) Example

(19:13) More detail

(24:08) Comparison to other approaches to robustness in cause prioritization

(27:21) Conclusion and future directions

(30:16) Acknowledgments

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First published:

October 8th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8Y9byyfpBpjGiW5mG/what-to-do-about-near-term-cluelessness-in-animal-welfare

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

Disclaimers: I am a computational physicist, not a machine learning expert: set your expectations of accuracy accordingly. All my text in this post is 100% human-written without AI assistance.

Introduction:

The threat of human destruction by AI is generally regarded by longtermists as the most important cause facing humanity. The essay collection “essays on longtermism” includes two essays arguing in favour of this hypothesis: this essay is primarily a response to the latter essay by Richard Ngo and Adam Bales.

Ngo and Bales argue that we should be concerned about an AI that would “disempower humanity and perhaps cause our extinction”. Rather than focussing on the whole chain of reasoning, they focus on one step of the argument: that some AI systems will learn to become scheming deceivers that go on to try and destroy humanity.

In the essay, Ngo and Bales make a fairly [...]

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Outline:

(04:18) Part 1: Why AI may be lazy, deceitful and sycophantic

(28:29) Part 2: the implications of lazy, deceitful, sycophantic AI

(37:58) Summary and conclusion

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

October 7th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/shcMvRatuzZxZ3fui/how-ai-may-become-deceitful-sycophantic-and-lazy

Linkpost URL:
https://titotal.substack.com/p/how-ai-may-become-deceitful-sycophantic

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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The following is a quick collection of forecasting markets and opinions from experts which give some sense of how well-informed people are thinking about the state of US democracy. This isn't meant to be a rigorous proof that this is the case (DM me for that), just a collection which I hope will get people thinking about what's happening in the US now.

Before looking at the forecasts you might first ask yourself:

• What probability would I put on authoritarian capture?, and
• At what probability of authoritarian capture would I think that more concern and effort is warranted? 

Forecasts[1]

• The US won’t be a democracy by 2030: 25% - Metaculus
• Will Trump 2.0 be the end of Democracy as we know it?: 48% - Manifold
• If Trump is elected, will the US still be a liberal democracy at the end of his term? (V-DEM): 61% [...]

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Outline:

(00:45) Forecasts

(01:50) Quotes from experts & commentators

(03:20) Some relevant research

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First published:

October 8th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eJNH2CikC4scTsqYs/experts-and-markets-think-authoritarian-capture-of-the-us

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

In September 2025 in Warsaw prior to CARE, 19 animal movement leaders came together to participate in the first ever AGI and animal welfare wargame.

TLDR: Great-power moves and food-security shocks repeatedly overrode animal welfare efforts; standard campaigning tactics like mass mobilization struggled under political crackdowns and were overshadowed by government's concerns about public unrest in the face of war risks.

Executive Summary

What this was

A strategic tabletop exercise designed to test whether current animal-advocacy theories of change held under fast AI progression and geopolitical stress. Participants were selected based on their potential strategic influence on the direction of the animal movement and assigned roles according to their pre-existing domain expertise which ranged from governments, frontier AI labs, animal agriculture companies, alternative-protein companies, animal advocates, funders, and media. They were then given an [amateurly] forecasted starting scenario and asked to stay in character while interacting and negotiating with one another over 4 rounds and 3 hours.

Participants of AGIxAnimals gathered in Warsaw

This exercise was adapted from the AI-2027 tabletop exercise, which we ran once exactly “as is” to understand the game mechanics. We then ran it again with a newly written animal welfare scenario for Compassionate [...]

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Outline:

(00:38) Executive Summary

(00:42) What this was

(01:49) Why we ran it

(02:45) Contents of this write up

(03:01) The Game

(03:04) Scenario in brief

(03:36) Game Highlights

(08:12) Takeaways

(08:16) Participant reflections

(09:41) Observed themes

(11:12) Implications for the movement

(12:05) Limitations

(12:40) Appendix

(12:43) Reference materials

(14:03) Acknowledgements

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First published:

October 7th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/k3inf3qkRpWurqE5q/agi-animals-wargame

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

In September 2025 in Warsaw prior to CARE, 19 animal movement leaders came together to participate in the first ever AGI and animal welfare wargame.

It was a strategic tabletop exercise designed to test whether current animal-advocacy theories of change held under fast AI progression and geopolitical stress. Participants were selected based on their potential strategic influence on the direction of the animal movement and assigned roles according to their pre-existing domain expertise which ranged from governments, frontier AI labs, animal agriculture companies, alternative-protein companies, animal advocates, funders, and media. They were then given an [amateurly] forecasted starting scenario and asked to stay in character while interacting and negotiating with one another over 4 rounds and 3 hours.

Participants of AGIxAnimals gathered in Warsaw

This exercise was adapted from the AI-2027 tabletop exercise, which we ran once exactly “as is” to understand the game mechanics. We then ran [...]

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Outline:

(01:27) Why we ran it

(02:22) What is in this write up

(02:56) Scenario in brief

(03:27) Game Highlights

(09:07) Participant Reflections

(10:31) Take-Home Messages

(13:00) Reference materials

(14:19) Acknowledgements

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First published:

October 8th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/k3inf3qkRpWurqE5q/agi-animals-wargame

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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