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

a system that was only of academic interest to a system that could take over the world if it wanted to without humanity waking up to that outside of like this narrow part of the research community.

Whereas what we've got, what we've had is something kind of much more steady where the intermediate phases are visible.

I guess it's related to this idea that humanity is actually okay at learning from feedback.

Like once we try things and we find out that they're bad for us, that, you know,

we can adjust our course.

And so because things have ended up being more continuous than that, and perhaps they will remain so, you can then anticipate that, you know, that these opportunities will arise.

Whereas recursive self-improvement, you know, one of the problems is it may mean that we go from systems that are, you know, quite impressive, but not amazing, to systems that are all powerful without that being visible.

And if so,

Then we're back in the world where, yeah.

But I do think that a lot of people aren't thinking quite seriously enough about how easy it will be to notice these things later on.

Yeah, I mean, look, the main bottom line is I don't know.

I think that there are heaps of options that are all quite interesting.

When I think about recursive self-improvement, here are a couple of different things that you could do.

So one of them is you could say...

There's some level of AI capabilities that we're not going to just kind of rocket through it, that it's high enough above our current levels that we would stop if we reached it.

That's one approach.

You could also have a kind of speed limit.

You could say there's a certain amount of capability increase per year.

Maybe it's the speed that's the problem.

And so you could set a limit that we're not going to go faster than a certain amount.

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