Ajeya Cotra

speaker

626 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 10 Mar

Ajeya Cotra’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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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’ · 17 Feb 2026 podcast

Yeah, for me, the bottom line there is that working on this stuff can be, like, quite stressful and quite tiring.

And I want to, like, completely check out and stop thinking about it and just be with people and talk about other issues.

So I guess they're, like, yeah, they're different strategies for trying to keep it manageable.

So I think during your sabbatical, you considered going independent and, I guess, becoming a writer or researcher, just doing your own thing.

But in the end, you decided to come back to OpenPhil, at least for a while.

Why was that?

And how did it go?

Integrated into a whole.

So you're trying to decide what to do next, whether to stay at OpenPhil or go into, I guess, like something more, I guess, less meta or maybe that will allow you to go into even more depth.

How are you using the stuff that you've learned about yourself over the last few years to inform that decision?

Yeah, I guess other generalizable observations are that, I mean, I guess OpenPhil's environment changed over the years.

You were there for eight years.

Nine years now.

Nine years, right, yeah.

But the kind of constraints that OpenPhil was laboring under in 2023 were very different than in 2016.

Totally.

And so unsurprisingly, I guess it might have been a good fit for you to start with, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be a good fit forever.

And also there was a leadership change at OpenPhil, the person you were reporting to changed.

And very often when that occurs, you see some other people leave as well because they were in their roles primarily because of their very good working relationship with that person or because they had strategic alignment with that person.

And I suppose potentially the CEO changing could have been a trigger for you to think, well, maybe this isn't so great anymore and I should like proactively start looking for something else.

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