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

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

And so because the stakes become really high and it's very much in their interest to actually reach some kind of agreement, I think that it can push through that barrier.

But there are these questions about like, how would you make sure that they're holding up their end of the bargain?

I think that the key aspect that you would need is basically to get

China and the US for it to be in their interests to have such an agreement if it could be verified.

And I think it is.

And I think that they will start to see that as we get closer.

And then we also need an ability to make the agreement actually bind them.

And then they could police their own spheres of influence.

So you might not have to get everyone else on board at first.

And so the kind of key step, I guess, is the verification.

Yeah, so I think there's a bunch of ways to do it, and it depends on exactly what the technology is at the time and so on.

People have often been thinking about some very technologically advanced verification mechanisms, such as having, you know, the next version of the NVIDIA chips, you know, be able to know exactly where they are in the world with GPS.

And if someone blocks the GPS, then maybe the chip shuts down and will only start working again if it can, you know,

if it can share where it is and so on.

I mean, that would be great if we get those things.

Then, for example, there would be credible ways to prove that your chips aren't actually working on this, you know, on advancing AI further.

I think people forget that the universe of possible ways of doing verification is very large, and I think the Cold War is really illustrative.

For example, one of the key things was that the US and the USSR wanted to reduce the number of nuclear-capable bombers that could threaten the other person's home soil.

And so what they did eventually is, you know, some bright person worked out, like thinking outside the box, worked out that they could put these, you know, these bombers were on the runway, that they could saw them in half with like a huge kind of circular saw.

Yeah.

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