Toby Ord

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1,415 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Toby Ord’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #250 – Toby Ord on where AGI timelines go wrong · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

No, at least I think that it's unlikely.

However, the chance that it might happen, I think is credible.

And this possibility really is one of the biggest issues in AI at the moment.

So why do you think it probably won't work or won't pack much of a punch?

Yeah, there's a couple of reasons.

One is that I think that AI research involves a lot more than just programming and a lot more than just running the kinds of simple experiments that have been automated so far.

So I think that there's a pretty reasonable chance that some major breakthroughs are still needed and that the AI assistance isn't going to be able to provide that.

Well, there's a lot of different types of work at a company.

And I think that this includes, say, cleaning and catering, also programming and other aspects of software engineering, and then kind of running some simple experiments.

But it also includes, I think, genuine strategic decision-making,

and also AI research.

That is not the case of programming where you know what you want and then you type it in, but the case if you don't know what you want, you don't know what changes to these basic architectures will lead to solving some of these longstanding issues and really letting

letting these systems take off.

And there's not much evidence at the moment that AI systems can do that kind of thing.

They might be able to really speed up the programming, but even if they made programming instantaneous, I think that that may not actually change the timelines all that much.

So they really would need to be able to help with these harder aspects of research.

I think it's quite plausible.

There's still some other issues.

So when you think of an intelligence explosion, you tend to think that this rate of progress over time is kind of bending upwards in some way.

But most people think that then it will eventually kind of plateau off.

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