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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But then his kind of bottom line is saying something like, he thinks that it's most likely that there'll be something like five years of AI research progress that happens within one calendar year, and then it starts to plateau.
something like that.
And it's like, oh, you know, all of this stuff about does it go to infinity or does it do this thing, you know, in the limit as time, you know, goes on forever, you know, what happens to it?
And then it kind of comes down to some little rule of thumb, like could go five times faster for a bit or something.
No.
And it also depends on where that leaves us.
Suppose we had the previous five years compressed into one year.
That would have been very disruptive, all from pre-ChatGPT through to where we are now.
But it would leave us at a point with a somewhat manageable technology.
And so it's not clear exactly where this thing does plateau.
It might plateau at a point that is...
um yeah that is not vastly superhuman um and that is controllable or it might go it might be that the five years takes us through that that period where things get out of control and i think you know that that would be a big deal obviously the five years itself is just a it's just guesswork uh but
Yeah, so if I cast my mind back to how this has been thought about before large language models, part of it was that there was this kind of question that got called the value loading question, where if you take the richness of human values and all the things we care about, and the way that if you miss out important aspects of the human condition, that it could lead to this impoverished future that is dystopian in some way.
Well, Stuart Russell was one of the few people who predicted what happened, which was that the AI system has read all of the books ever written, which are millions of pages of text.
On almost all pages, someone is judging some other human being.
Some human's judging some other human about something, whether it's Lizzie Bennet judging Mr. Darcy or what have you.
And so you can learn vast amounts about this.
And that was outside of the previous conception because it was going to happen so quickly that it wasn't clear there was any kind of moment where you could kind of
you know, get it to understand what we care about.
And also, that's kind of one aspect, but maybe the broader aspect is that kind of feedback, you know, some ability to actually say, you know, if you've got some experiment,
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