Sneha Revanur

speaker

393 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 8 Jul

Sneha Revanur’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 Jul 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #246 – Sneha Revanur on how a small team of activists helped pass America's landmark AI safety laws · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

So what gives?

Honestly, it wasn't a specific argument that changed my mind.

In fact, I had friends who approached me and tried to reason with me because they knew that I was doing AI advocacy and that did not really do much to break down my cognitive walls at first.

Honestly, it was just like ChatGPT being released my freshman year of college.

It has been very interesting to form...

my core views on the world with the arc of AI progress as my backdrop.

And as soon as I was interacting with LLMs every day, I couldn't help but feel humbled by how wrong and how dismissive I had been before.

Because what really motivated my dismissal before was that I was fundamentally a capability skeptic, right?

Who was imagining the future via...

basically the wrong mode of thinking.

I think it took experiencing LLMs for me to realize that to avoid being blindsided again, I would have to toggle into a very different mode altogether, one that is very tolerant of like a super high and initially uncomfortable degree of extrapolation and imagination.

Yeah, the way that I think about this is there's politics in the narrow sense of the word, right?

The slow grind of bills and hearings and sort of like strictly thinking about things as like passing legislation.

And there's politics in the broader and maybe more ambitious sense of the word where it's about building power.

And I think we really strive for the latter.

We wanna find creative and strategic and oftentimes totally experimental ways to build power for the cause of AI safety.

This is obviously hard, as you pointed out, because we're working against the clock.

And oftentimes we sink a lot of resources into things that we don't know aren't going to work until after the fact.

But I think there is one philosophy that tends to work for profoundly uncertain situations like this, which is if you do everything, you will win.

I think ENCODE takes a lot of swings.

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