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 ability to learn from feedback for us.

Whereas this new version is substantially more gradual, but also it has a lot more opportunities to understand what's happening.

We even have interpretability tools to try to understand what's going on inside the systems while they're climbing up this approach.

So I think that it does look somewhat safer than these old versions.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, I'm actually working on a paper at the moment trying to understand these possibilities of really explosive growth, which I do think is credible and I'm concerned about it.

But a lot of that is trying to understand the dynamics and is this the kind of explosive growth that's exponential?

Or is it the kind of thing that is faster than an exponential, such that it would have this kind of vertical asymptote, where there's a particular time at which the level of this intelligence goes to infinity?

That kind of dynamic, as opposed to the more typical compounding exponential growth from populations and things.

And so some of the debate is over that.

But even when you're debating that kind of question,

almost everyone in this area thinks that the intelligence is going to cap out at some particular maximum level anyway.

And so to some extent, the exact shape of it, you know, may end up being kind of moot.

You know, if it caps out, not that much above where it currently is, for example.

Or there's these questions of,

oh, sure, it's an exponential, but is the doubling time on the exponential like a week or is it a decade?

That's a big deal.

And often the theoretical analysis doesn't shed much light on that.

So one of my colleagues, Tom Davidson, has great work on this, great theoretical work, where he's looking at all these questions about the theory of it and will it have this vertical asymptote, which gets called a mathematical singularity, not to be confused with the

the kind of more sci-fi concept of the singularity, although maybe it could be related.

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