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

And of course, you know, for us to pass a bill in California, it took getting the first one vetoed, right?

And so I think it's important to recognize what some of these limitations are.

But I think that for someone who is tolerant of these setbacks, for someone who recognizes that failure is oftentimes the precursor to success or whatever, I

advocacy can still be a great way to make an impact.

Yeah, I think one thing that I would say off the bat is building up those networks is just really, really hard, right?

Especially what we were doing before, you know, trying to motivate all of these uncompensated high school and college-aged volunteers.

I think it was really, really hard to translate that into genuine political outcomes.

And even though it was super exciting to be able to, you know, summon on people to, you

do a lot of things in a specific state, for example, or get a lot of people to call up the member of Congress or activate in very specific ways.

I think that overall, the cost benefit analysis just wasn't really making sense for us in terms of like, is this actually translating into our desired outcomes?

I think also one point that I would make is that

the way that people think about AI is not monolithic whatsoever.

I think it's extremely hard and almost impossible.

And this also just wasn't true of the way that we had things set up before that, you know, I can say I am the voice of the people and I represent all people and how they feel about AI just because people's views on the issue are so like diverse and oftentimes, you know, ill-formed.

And like, sometimes they like kind of have like a vague sense of how they feel about something or they care a little bit about this and not about that.

And I think that,

I think it's really, really important to me that what I'm saying when I speak on behalf of a group of people is credible and authentic and sincere and not that I'm like trying to, you know, play up support that might not actually be there.

And so I think that the strategy that we've taken now of kind of just like bringing together groups that already have formed perspectives on individual issues and letting them speak

For example, you know, going to kid safety groups that obviously already are, you know, very deeply passionate about the issue and, you know, talking to moms who have like literally lost their children to addictive AI companions or whatever and letting them, you know, say their word and speak their stories and kind of like not putting words in their mouth or claiming to be an ambassador on behalf of those people, I think is not just the right way of doing politics, but also just like significantly more effective, I think, in actually getting things done.

I think one thing that has been pretty surreal to see over the last year especially is just the sheer number of strange bedfellows that have banded together for the cause of AI safety, like extremely strange bedfellows.

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