Rohin Shah

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1,071 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 2 Jun

Rohin Shah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #245 – Rohin Shah on what it's really like to run AGI safety at Google DeepMind (and where I disagree with 'doomers') · 2 Jun 2026 podcast

There are some disanalogies between capabilities research and alignment research.

I think the disanalogies are particularly large today and will become smaller in the future as you get closer to these sorts of AIs that are capable of doing this automated research.

And by the time you get to that point, there are still disanalogies, but I think they're relatively small.

And by default, you shouldn't really expect a big difference in the ability to do automated alignment research versus automated capabilities research.

And so...

There's like some stuff you could do to prepare, but mostly I feel like we just don't know what it's going to look like.

It will be so much more efficient to focus on other things that we can do today and then just adapt once we get to the point where the AIs are capable of doing this.

Now, I guess one thing I do want to flag is like,

There's another worry you could have, which is like, sure, all the technical safety and alignment research gets accelerated, but that's not the only thing that you need in order to get good outcomes.

You also need governance to go better.

And so you also need to accelerate governance.

Now, governance has a totally different set of skills than capabilities or safety or alignment research.

And so it's really much less clear that AI systems that drastically accelerate capabilities research will also drastically accelerate governance.

In addition to the AI's just not having the capabilities to do that, which is one possibility, there's also just like, will we as a society

be willing to use AIs to accelerate governance.

I think possibly not, because capabilities researchers want to actually accelerate themselves with AIs, and I don't get the sense that governance people will want to do this.

And so this sort of accelerating governance work is one of my top two things that I would do if I had to make a career change right now to something else, like figure out what we need to do in order to accelerate governance and start doing the work that we need to do it.

Yeah, I definitely agree that the AGI-pilled governance people will do it.

The non-profits and think tanks associated with the AI safety community will absolutely do it.

But they're a small fraction of overall governance.

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