Rob Wiblin

speaker

5,091 appearances 15 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2021 last heard 6 Aug

Rob Wiblin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 3.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #250 – Toby Ord on where AGI timelines go wrong · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

These days, I often think and talk more about timelines to recursive self-improvement.

I think other people, and including me in the past, we've also talked about timelines to artificial superintelligence, and there's other points along that as well.

And I suppose because we're all throwing out dates and sometimes not specifying exactly what we're talking about, it's easy to agree but feel like you're disagreeing.

I think 10 years ago we would have said that AGI would be able to run a cafe.

So is the main implication of broad timelines that people shouldn't only make bets that pay off really quickly, basically?

I guess it sounds like from your piece, your main worry is that there might be people out there who are thinking, I really want to work on making AGI go better, but this project that I'm contemplating won't pay off for five years.

That's just too long.

There's no point even doing it.

We'll be dead by then or things will be out of our hands by then.

I'm going to do this thing that pays off really quickly.

And that thing otherwise could just be less impactful.

Yeah.

So I guess I haven't heard anyone say anything as extreme as you shouldn't do anything that doesn't pay off for more than a year.

But I could imagine that part of the motivation is just an absolute, like people are kicking and screaming because they're just so exasperated that they feel like the rest of society and like even governments that are like quite AGI-pilled, there's like no hustle.

There's like no sense of urgency to like address this stuff that they feel is like coming so soon.

Yeah, I guess it's just difficult to balance these different audiences.

Yeah.

Bigger than that?

Bigger than only focusing on one year?

I think something that's even crazier is that there'll be governments or people in government who basically do have shorter timelines or broad timelines or whatever, but then it feels like it has no effect almost on what's going on.

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