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

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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

And then at that point, I think having generated that evidence will be immensely helpful for this goal.

Again, I don't really expect that evidence to come because I tend to think it probably won't be a problem.

There's this nice post from Scott Alexander, guided by the beauty of our weapons.

It's probably my favorite post from him of all time.

where he talks about how there are symmetric weapons, which allow you to argue for some sort of conclusion or get people on your side, irrespective of whether your claim is true or not.

And then there are asymmetric weapons, which only work to the extent that the thing that you're arguing for is true, or at least are more likely to work in that setting.

And he has this, I think, really quite moving description at some point of how beautiful and elegant this all is, where for the asymmetric weapons, you and your quote-unquote enemies will join forces, hold hands, and work together to do it because both of you are thinking that it's going to prove you right until the very end when the evidence comes in.

And then you just agree because the evidence showed you the answer.

Well, then you move the goalposts, I would say.

But I suppose a reasonable onlooker can tell who was right.

Sure.

Fair enough.

But that's the sort of strategy that I would much rather do at the moment, given that I think the bottleneck is by far the fact that people don't agree on whether or not this is necessary.

Yeah, so this is like a good example of where attention to detail really matters a lot.

So you're going to get a pretty long answer from me because it's just fairly disjunctive.

So I think maybe to start with, let me recap the basic story for why chain of thought monitoring should be expected to be particularly good.

I call this the externalized reasoning property.

And the way I usually phrase it would be that like,

For sufficiently difficult tasks, by which I mean tasks that require a lot of reasoning to do, some sort of serial reasoning over time, transformers, not necessarily other architectures, but at least transformers, must use the chain of thought as a form of working memory.

There's really no other alternative.

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