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

Or do we want to say, well, we actually don't know when we're going to feel comfortable?

I do definitely worry that if we impose some sort of moratorium too early, that there will be a significant backlash to this and people will view it as a failed effort and people getting far too anxious, getting anxious far ahead of time.

Eventually the moratorium would be lifted and this would then make it more difficult to do it at the appropriate time when the actual direct risk and the ability to speed up the research that you want is much more promising.

Do you worry about that?

I think it's a concern.

So it could well be true.

Another way that I worry it would backfire is while you're under the moratorium, unless we have a bunch of other rules as well, the supply of compute continues increasing enormously.

We're still going to be printing lots of chips and making lots of fabs and doing further research on chip design and so on.

And so at the point you later release the moratorium, you would expect a whole bunch of catch up growth as you train bigger models or like you now use the prohibited techniques because like many of the underlying driving factors that were causing the progress have kind of continued underground in the meantime.

And furthermore, on top of like the fact that it might go faster at the point that you release it, you would expect that if you had a moratorium on particular products

practices that you might get basically a whole bunch of different actors, a whole lot of different companies converging up to the level above which you can't go.

And so it'll be like a more multipolar, a more competitive situation at that point, which could give groups, I guess, even more reason to try to rush ahead.

It's basically just a handful of companies.

I mean, I guess it does feel like a heavy lift, at least at the moment, I suppose, to imagine this, but-

Exactly.

I think ahead of getting any moratorium on superintelligence or RSI, I think a type of moratorium that is like plausibly on the table, like I think in the next year, is a moratorium on a particular dangerous research practice that I think many of the companies are not enthusiastic about, which is unmonitorable chain of thought.

So eliminating, I guess, the ability to inspect what the models are thinking as they're reasoning about stuff.

There are various research avenues you could go down that would make it impossible to read what they're saying, or at least much more difficult to read it.

And I guess there's ways of making the...

each forward pass so long that they could actually engage in like quite a substantial amount of reasoning before you saw anything that they output.

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