Toby Ord

speaker

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

And so it will start to bend back down as you reach some kind of limit, or maybe the kind of increasing complexity of the system starts to overwhelm your ability to improve it.

And so most people think it will bend back down to flatten off.

And so the real question is before that, is there a phase where it's bending upwards or is it just the phase that's flattening off?

And I don't think that it's clear which one of those it is, even if it could replace all of the human skills.

Yeah.

So there's an interestingly long history of talking about recursive self-improvement.

Quite a few decades of talking about it, followed by now we're in the situation where a lot of people are suggesting that they're doing it.

And so this started famously with I.J.

Goode, who talked about this possibility of an ultra-intelligent machine.

And what I think a lot of people forget about his story of recursive self-improvement, although he didn't use that term, he used the term intelligence explosion.

He was thinking of an AI system, once you have an ultra-intelligent machine, one that's more outside the human range, is kind of beyond anything that a human can do.

And in fact, it's beyond what the entire research community can do.

Once you've got that point, he said that this is the last invention you need ever make because it would be better at everything by definition.

And one of those things is building more intelligent AI systems.

And so he thought that this would lead to this ultra-intelligent machine builds an ultra-intelligent machine number two, which then builds number three and so on.

And that this would have an explosion leaving humanity far behind, although perhaps it would also peter out at some very high level.

So that was the first idea.

And then there's kind of a big change to it by Eliezer Yudkowsky around about the year 2000, where what he considered was, you know, maybe you don't need it to be ultra intelligent to start this off.

So in IJ Good's version, the AI community have had to get all the way up to ultra intelligent machines without any recursive self-improvement.

But in Yudkowsky's version, he thought, well, maybe if the one thing the system was good at was improving its own code.

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