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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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

The most notable these days is the AI coding systems that could take on a whole lot of the coding responsibilities for creating the next AI.

But we've got a system there where there's humans and AI together.

And the AI is not like way below the human level.

It's not way above.

It's kind of somewhere on the kind of lower outskirts of the human level at a lot of things.

And it begins by inputting a small amount into the process, but that amount could increase and increase and increase until it's mainly driving the process.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I think the biggest change is one with respect to safety, which is that there's much more of an opportunity for humans to remain in the loop.

I remember noticing back, I don't know, 15 years ago with the Yudkowsky story that he had this compelling vision about why AI could be really dangerous.

And at some point, I noticed that so much of the danger was coming from this recursive self-improvement concept.

And, you know, I remember thinking maybe there should be a moratorium on this, yeah, about 15 years ago.

But it was outside the Overton window to talk about not doing this thing that no one could do.

So it's a little bit hard to get these things off the ground when you're too early.

But, yeah, it was driving a lot of the risk because it was this thing where you had to get everything absolutely right.

You'd had to kind of like understand human values and be motivated by them, you know, at the point where you start this process.

And he was imagining a system that can't even speak English at the point where you start the process.

So like, how do you, you know, write some, you know, maybe you write this kind of like English text that like once it's halfway up, it then can read it.

And then it kind of, you know, tries to act on that and so on.

But really dangerous without being able to have any way to kind of interact with the system, you know,

once it's going.

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