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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

But I definitely would caution people against using the score for really fine-grained things like how good is Claude versus Gemini versus whatever.

Or, for example, trying to understand the difference between open-source models and closed-source models because I think the open-source models...

are probably more overfit to the benchmarks than the closed source ones.

And this probably is going to, if you try to use this score to look at the exact difference between those two, it's probably going to mislead you a little bit.

I'm a slight downvote on the abruptness.

I am not a downvote on like, will there be an intelligence explosion?

I think, so like, you know, what do I think that I feel like you're pretty confident about?

It will be some like really strong statement, like with a lot of strong preconditions, like, you know, when

When you have AI systems such that for almost any economically valuable task you care about, you would prefer to hire the AI system rather than the human, which, among other things, implies that the AI is cheaper than the human, which I don't think is a given.

At that point, assuming that we don't take some sort of action to try and prevent it, in fact, we are trying to use the AI systems to substantially accelerate research and development across the board, not just in AI, but all of the economy, then probably within a century, we will have some kind of intelligence explosion and reach technological maturity.

Um, that's like so many preconditions, so many, uh, it's like, uh, it's still a like kind of crazy statement.

I'm like saying, I'm saying we will have an intelligence explosion at all.

And I feel actually pretty confident about that.

Um, but it is a lot weaker than the thing that I would guess will actually happen, which will be substantially faster and happen substantially earlier than what that statement would imply.

Um,

So what I would actually say is a decent chance that it starts at the point where the AI systems can automate most of AI R&D as opposed to all arbitrary R&D.

Decent chance that it finishes over five to 10 years rather than a century.

Depends on exactly what you set as the starting point and so on.

Going back to your original question about abruptness, the reason I'm a slight downvote on abruptness is that I would expect that actually the first AI systems, automated systems that can really automate AI R&D will probably just be very expensive to the point of potentially being more expensive than humans would be.

You can see this with over the last year, there's just been way more investment in inference time compute, inference time scaling.

Showing 841–860 of 1,071 · page 43 of 54