Rohin Shah

speaker

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

So lots of good work to do here in the future.

And I should note that this is like, I think you've had Buck and Ryan on the podcast before.

This is like pretty similar to the AI control.

It is the AI control work that they talk about.

And I think it's just on our side, a little bit more focused on like,

the infrastructure that we have to build in order to enable this sort of approach, rather than the specifics of exactly how we're going to build the monitor and so on, which is a more standard machine learning problem that I think will be relatively easy to do in comparison.

Yeah, so I think one of the most striking things about reality or the world that I've seen is just the examples of straight lines on graphs going straight.

I think Scott Alexander put it well in, I don't remember which post this was, but I think he says something like,

I don't understand the gods of straight lines very well.

And honestly, they kind of freak me out, but I'm not going to bet against them.

And one particular straight line that we've been seeing a lot recently is just sort of like constant, roughly 3% GDP growth per year.

Now, there are good arguments for why that won't necessarily last.

And instead, probably we will see an intelligence explosion at some point, which would drastically increase the rate of growth.

But I do think that when reasoning about this, it's quite important to say, what exactly about AI makes it different from the current situation?

Why are we betting against the gods of straight lines?

Now, I think the...

The usual answer to this, which is based on economic endogenous growth models, I think maybe most famously from a paper from Kremer in 1993,

is that there are roughly, there are a couple of effects.

So one, as technology improves, that allows you to find new ideas more quickly.

It's like, you know, once you have the microscope, you can do biology significantly better.

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