Benjamin Todd

speaker

4,140 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2023 last heard 28 May

Benjamin Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #244 – Benjamin Todd on how we’re updating our career advice for the strangest time in history · 26 May 2026 podcast

And yeah, like we now have kind of like empirical estimates of a lot of these different factors.

Like we can see that roughly the AI research workforce has been increasing 30% a year or 40% per year, but algorithmic efficiency has been doubling each year.

So that suggests that each time the amount of research going into AI is doubled, the algorithms improve much more than a doubling.

which is the thing that you need to start an algorithmic feedback loop.

In the past, it was a much more theoretical thing where it was like, well, if it could do AI research, maybe it could start a feedback loop.

But you can actually have a model and estimate the parameters empirically and show that it probably does.

it really is possible to transition quite fast to working on these.

It's not an easy thing to do, but we have seen lots of examples of people in a matter of months making quite dramatic career changes.

And there's a kind of standard playbook that all these people use and can work.

So there's a few steps.

One is like doing a crash course to understand the field.

So like what the big problems are, what the main views on timelines are, what some of the main interventions are,

the main players, you want to be able to have a broad understanding of these things.

And yeah, we have a reading list on 80,000 Hours.

I think it's called the 11 Central Readings on AI.

That's a good starting point.

And then the most recommended thing is often one of the blue dot courses.

And that just aims to give you that grounding.

Then you can think about which kind of broad way of contributing might work for you.

Are you more of an operations, organization building type person, more of a comms?

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