Ajeya Cotra

Savvy people find ways to automate routine parts of their jobs.

Today, I'm speaking with Ajaya Kocha.

Ajaya is a senior advisor at Open Philanthropy, where in 2024, she led their technical AI safety grantmaking.

More generally, she's been doing AI-related research and strategy since 2018 and has become very influential in AI circles for her work on timelines, capability evaluations, and threat modeling.

Thanks so much for coming back on the show, Ajaya.

So doing this interview gave me a chance to go back and listen to the interview that we did, that we recorded, I guess, two and a half years ago.

And I have to say you were very on the ball.

There was a lot of issues that came up in that conversation that you were bringing to people's attention that I think in the subsequent two and a half years seem like a much, much bigger deal now.

You talked about meters, evaluating autonomous capabilities, a line of research that's gone on to become super influential.

very widely read, I think, in policy circles.

You talked about using probes to monitor and shut down dangerous conversations, something that's a pretty standard practice and maybe one of the potentially most useful outputs from mechanistic interpretability.

You talked about the importance of using chain of thought and scratch pads to monitor what AIs are doing and why.

It's still probably the dominant technique.

You talked about the growing situational awareness of AI models and the resulting possibility of deceptive alignment, something that's now completely

Thank you so much for having me.

models might end up just flattering people rather than giving accurate information because that's kind of something that we enjoy.

So I feel like, I mean, you didn't come up with all of these ideas or anything like that, but I think you're ahead of the curve and maybe we'll get some ahead of the curve ideas in this interview as well.

So you think that a key driver of disagreements about kind of everything to do with AI is people's different views on how likely AGI is to speed up science and technology and I guess physical infrastructure and manufacturing.

Why is that?

Yeah, I guess you've hinted at the fact that there is an enormously wide range of views on this, but can you give us a sense of just how large the spectrum is and what the picture looks like on either end?