OpenAI: The nonprofit refuses to die (with Tyler Whitmer)
11 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last December, the OpenAI business put forward a plan to completely sideline its nonprofit board. Bu...
Helen Toner on the geopolitics of AI in China and the Middle East
05 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
With the US racing to develop AGI and superintelligence ahead of China, you might expect the two cou...
Holden Karnofsky: "We're not racing to AGI because of a coordination problem" and all his other AI takes
30 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For years, working on AI safety usually meant theorising about the ‘alignment problem’ or trying...
Daniel Kokotajlo on what a hyperspeed robot economy might look like
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When Daniel Kokotajlo talks to security experts at major AI labs, they tell him something chilling: ...
#224 – There's a cheap and low-tech way to save humanity from any engineered disease | Andrew Snyder-Beattie
02 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Conventional wisdom is that safeguarding humanity from the worst biological risks — microbes optim...
Inside the Biden admin’s AI policy approach | Jake Sullivan, Biden’s NSA | via The Cognitive Revolution
26 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jake Sullivan was the US National Security Advisor from 2021-2025. He joined our friends on The Cogn...
#223 – Neel Nanda on leading a Google DeepMind team at 26 – and advice if you want to work at an AI company (part 2)
15 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At 26, Neel Nanda leads an AI safety team at Google DeepMind, has published dozens of influential pa...
#222 – Can we tell if an AI is loyal by reading its mind? DeepMind's Neel Nanda (part 1)
08 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We don’t know how AIs think or why they do what they do. Or at least, we don’t know much. That f...
#221 – Kyle Fish on the most bizarre findings from 5 AI welfare experiments
28 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when you lock two AI systems in a room together and tell them they can discuss anything...
How not to lose your job to AI (article by Benjamin Todd)
31 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
About half of people are worried they’ll lose their job to AI. They’re right to be concerned: AI...
Rebuilding after apocalypse: What 13 experts say about bouncing back
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when civilisation faces its greatest tests?This compilation brings together insights fr...
#220 – Ryan Greenblatt on the 4 most likely ways for AI to take over, and the case for and against AGI in <8 years
08 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ryan Greenblatt — lead author on the explosive paper “Alignment faking in large language models”...
#219 – Toby Ord on graphs AI companies would prefer you didn't (fully) understand
24 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The era of making AI smarter just by making it bigger is ending. But that doesn’t mean progress is...
#218 – Hugh White on why Trump is abandoning US hegemony – and that’s probably good
12 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, US allies have slept soundly under the protection of America’s overwhelming military ...
#217 – Beth Barnes on the most important graph in AI right now — and the 7-month rule that governs its progress
02 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI models today have a 50% chance of successfully completing a task that would take an expert human ...
Beyond human minds: The bewildering frontier of consciousness in insects, AI, and more
23 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What if there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp — or a chatbot?For centuries, humans have d...
Don’t believe OpenAI’s “nonprofit” spin (emergency pod with Tyler Whitmer)
15 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
OpenAI’s recent announcement that its nonprofit would “retain control” of its for-profit busin...
The case for and against AGI by 2030 (article by Benjamin Todd)
12 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
More and more people have been saying that we might have AGI (artificial general intelligence) befor...
Emergency pod: Did OpenAI give up, or is this just a new trap? (with Rose Chan Loui)
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When attorneys general intervene in corporate affairs, it usually means something has gone seriously...
#216 – Ian Dunt on why governments in Britain and elsewhere can't get anything done – and how to fix it
02 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When you have a system where ministers almost never understand their portfolios, civil servants chan...
Serendipity, weird bets, & cold emails that actually work: Career advice from 16 former guests
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do you navigate a career path when the future of work is uncertain? How important is mentorship ...
#215 – Tom Davidson on how AI-enabled coups could allow a tiny group to seize power
16 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout history, technological revolutions have fundamentally shifted the balance of power in soc...
Guilt, imposter syndrome & doing good: 16 past guests share their mental health journeys
11 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
"We are aiming for a place where we can decouple the scorecard from our worthiness. It’s of course...
#214 – Buck Shlegeris on controlling AI that wants to take over – so we can use it anyway
04 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Most AI safety conversations centre on alignment: ensuring AI systems share our values and goals. Bu...
15 expert takes on infosec in the age of AI
28 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
"There’s almost no story of the future going well that doesn’t have a part that’s like '…and...
#213 – Will MacAskill on AI causing a “century in a decade” – and how we're completely unprepared
11 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The 20th century saw unprecedented change: nuclear weapons, satellites, the rise and fall of communi...
Emergency pod: Judge plants a legal time bomb under OpenAI (with Rose Chan Loui)
07 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When OpenAI announced plans to convert from nonprofit to for-profit control last October, it likely ...
#139 Classic episode – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value
25 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A casino offers you a game. A coin will be tossed. If it comes up heads on the first flip you win $2...
#143 Classic episode – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons
19 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' rig...
#212 – Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable & how to shape AI development anyway
14 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Technology doesn’t force us to do anything — it merely opens doors. But military and economic co...
Emergency pod: Elon tries to crash OpenAI's party (with Rose Chan Loui)
12 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On Monday Musk made the OpenAI nonprofit foundation an offer they want to refuse, but might have tro...
AGI disagreements and misconceptions: Rob, Luisa, & past guests hash it out
10 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Will LLMs soon be made into autonomous agents? Will they lead to job losses? Is AI misinformation ov...
#124 Classic episode – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions
07 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If someone said a global health and development programme was sustainable, participatory, and holist...
If digital minds could suffer, how would we ever know? (Article)
04 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” Those words were produced by the A...
#132 Classic episode – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems
31 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If a business has spent $100 million developing a product, it’s a fair bet that they don’t want ...
#138 Classic episode – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter
22 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What in the world is intrinsically good — good in itself even if it has no other effects? Over the...
#134 Classic episode – Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us
15 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies ...
#140 Classic episode – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn’t in decline
08 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Is war in long-term decline? Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature brought this previously...
2024 Highlightapalooza! (The best of The 80,000 Hours Podcast this year)
27 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"A shameless recycling of existing content to drive additional audience engagement on the cheap… o...
#211 – Sam Bowman on why housing still isn't fixed and what would actually work
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Rich countries seem to find it harder and harder to do anything that creates some losers. People who...
#210 – Cameron Meyer Shorb on dismantling the myth that we can’t do anything to help wild animals
29 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"I really don’t want to give the impression that I think it is easy to make predictable, controlle...
#209 – Rose Chan Loui on OpenAI’s gambit to ditch its nonprofit
27 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
One OpenAI critic calls it “the theft of at least the millennium and quite possibly all of human h...
#208 – Elizabeth Cox on the case that TV shows, movies, and novels can improve the world
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"I think stories are the way we shift the Overton window — so widen the range of things that are a...
#207 – Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on why she shut down her charity, and why more founders should follow her lead
14 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"I think one of the reasons I took [shutting down my charity] so hard is because entrepreneurship is...
Parenting insights from Rob and 8 past guests
08 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
With kids very much on the team's mind we thought it would be fun to review some comments about pare...
#206 – Anil Seth on the predictive brain and how to study consciousness
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"In that famous example of the dress, half of the people in the world saw [blue and black], half saw...
How much does a vote matter? (Article)
28 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you care about social impact, is voting important? In this piece, Rob investigates the two key th...
#205 – Sébastien Moro on the most insane things fish can do
23 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"You have a tank split in two parts: if the fish gets in the compartment with a red circle, it will ...
#204 – Nate Silver on making sense of SBF, and his biggest critiques of effective altruism
16 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Rob Wiblin speaks with FiveThirtyEight election forecaster and author Nate Silver about his new book...
#203 – Peter Godfrey-Smith on interfering with wild nature, accepting death, and the origin of complex civilisation
03 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"In the human case, it would be mistaken to give a kind of hour-by-hour accounting. You know, 'I had...
Luisa and Keiran on free will, and the consequences of never feeling enduring guilt or shame
27 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode from our second show, 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris chat about ...
#202 – Venki Ramakrishnan on the cutting edge of anti-ageing science
19 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"For every far-out idea that turns out to be true, there were probably hundreds that were simply cra...
#201 – Ken Goldberg on why your robot butler isn’t here yet
13 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"Perception is quite difficult with cameras: even if you have a stereo camera, you still can’t rea...
#200 – Ezra Karger on what superforecasters and experts think about existential risks
04 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"It’s very hard to find examples where people say, 'I’m starting from this point. I’m starting...
#199 – Nathan Calvin on California’s AI bill SB 1047 and its potential to shape US AI policy
29 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"I do think that there is a really significant sentiment among parts of the opposition that it’s n...
#198 – Meghan Barrett on upending everything you thought you knew about bugs in 3 hours
26 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"This is a group of animals I think people are particularly unfamiliar with. They are especially poo...
#197 – Nick Joseph on whether Anthropic's AI safety policy is up to the task
22 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The three biggest AI companies — Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind — have now all released policie...
#196 – Jonathan Birch on the edge cases of sentience and why they matter
15 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"In the 1980s, it was still apparently common to perform surgery on newborn babies without anaesthet...
#195 – Sella Nevo on who's trying to steal frontier AI models, and what they could do with them
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"Computational systems have literally millions of physical and conceptual components, and around 98%...
#194 – Vitalik Buterin on defensive acceleration and how to regulate AI when you fear government
26 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"If you’re a power that is an island and that goes by sea, then you’re more likely to do things ...
#193 – Sihao Huang on navigating the geopolitics of US–China AI competition
18 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"You don’t necessarily need world-leading compute to create highly risky AI systems. The biggest b...
#192 – Annie Jacobsen on what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US
12 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"Ring one: total annihilation; no cellular life remains. Ring two, another three-mile diameter out: ...
#191 (Part 2) – Carl Shulman on government and society after AGI
05 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This is the second part of our marathon interview with Carl Shulman. The first episode is on the eco...
#191 (Part 1) – Carl Shulman on the economy and national security after AGI
27 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This is the first part of our marathon interview with Carl Shulman. The second episode is on governm...
#190 – Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious
07 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"One of the most amazing things about planet Earth is that there are complex bags of mostly water —...
#189 – Rachel Glennerster on why we still don’t have vaccines that could save millions
29 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"You can’t charge what something is worth during a pandemic. So we estimated that the value of one...
#188 – Matt Clancy on whether science is good
23 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"Suppose we make these grants, we do some of those experiments I talk about. We discover, for exampl...
#187 – Zach Weinersmith on how researching his book turned him from a space optimist into a "space bastard"
14 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"Earth economists, when they measure how bad the potential for exploitation is, they look at things ...
#186 – Dean Spears on why babies are born small in Uttar Pradesh, and how to save their lives
01 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"I work in a place called Uttar Pradesh, which is a state in India with 240 million people. One in e...
#185 – Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals
18 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"The constraint right now on factory farming is how far can you push the biology of these animals? B...
#184 – Zvi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT
11 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Many of you will have heard of Zvi Mowshowitz as a superhuman information-absorbing-and-processing m...
AI governance and policy (Article)
28 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s release is a reading of our career review of AI governance and policy, written and narrate...
#183 – Spencer Greenberg on causation without correlation, money and happiness, lightgassing, hype vs value, and more
14 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"When a friend comes to me with a decision, and they want my thoughts on it, very rarely am I trying...
#182 – Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more
08 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"[One] thing is just to spend time thinking about the kinds of things animals can do and what their ...
#181 – Laura Deming on the science that could keep us healthy in our 80s and beyond
01 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"The question I care about is: What do I want to do? Like, when I'm 80, how strong do I want to be? ...
#180 – Hugo Mercier on why gullibility and misinformation are overrated
21 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The World Economic Forum’s global risks survey of 1,400 experts, policymakers, and industry leader...
#179 – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety
12 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely in...
#178 – Emily Oster on what the evidence actually says about pregnancy and parenting
01 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"I think at various times — before you have the kid, after you have the kid — it's useful to sit...
#177 – Nathan Labenz on recent AI breakthroughs and navigating the growing rift between AI safety and accelerationist camps
24 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Back in December we spoke with Nathan Labenz — AI entrepreneur and host of The Cognitive Revolutio...
#90 Classic episode – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be
12 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
You wake up in a mysterious box, and hear the booming voice of God: “I just flipped a coin. If it ...
#112 Classic episode – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
08 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on...
#111 Classic episode – Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms
04 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you’re living in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, your best bet at a high-paying career is probably ...
2023 Mega-highlights Extravaganza
31 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Happy new year! We've got a different kind of holiday release for you today. Rather than a 'classic ...
#100 Classic episode – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome
27 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s episode is one of the most remarkable and really, unique, pieces of content we’ve ever p...
#176 – Nathan Labenz on the final push for AGI, understanding OpenAI's leadership drama, and red-teaming frontier models
22 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
OpenAI says its mission is to build AGI — an AI system that is better than human beings at everyth...
#175 – Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child
14 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Lead is one of the most poisonous things going. A single sugar sachet of lead, spread over a park th...
#174 – Nita Farahany on the neurotechnology already being used to convict criminals and manipulate workers
07 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"It will change everything: it will change our workplaces, it will change our interactions with the ...
#173 – Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe
22 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"We do have a tendency to anthropomorphise nonhumans — which means attributing human characteristi...
#172 – Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news
17 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Is following important political and international news a civic duty — or is it our civic duty to ...
#171 – Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures
09 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"Rare events can still cause catastrophic accidents. The concern that has been raised by experts goi...
#170 – Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down
01 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"One [outrageous example of air pollution] is municipal waste burning that happens in many cities in...
#169 – Paul Niehaus on whether cash transfers cause economic growth, and keeping theft to acceptable levels
26 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"One of our earliest supporters and a dear friend of mine, Mark Lampert, once said to me, “The way...
#168 – Ian Morris on whether deep history says we're heading for an intelligence explosion
23 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"If we carry on looking at these industrialised economies, not thinking about what it is they're act...
#167 – Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption
18 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"There have been literally thousands of years of breeding and living with animals to optimise these ...
#166 – Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere
12 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"If you and I and 100 other people were on the first ship that was going to go settle Mars, and were...
#165 – Anders Sandberg on war in space, whether civilisations age, and the best things possible in our universe
06 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"Now, the really interesting question is: How much is there an attacker-versus-defender advantage in...
#164 – Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives
02 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"Imagine a fast-spreading respiratory HIV. It sweeps around the world. Almost nobody has symptoms. N...
Great power conflict (Article)
22 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s release is a reading of our Great power conflict problem profile, written and narrated by ...
#163 – Toby Ord on the perils of maximising the good that you do
08 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Effective altruism is associated with the slogan "do the most good." On one level, this has to be un...
The 80,000 Hours Career Guide (2023)
04 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
An audio version of the 2023 80,000 Hours career guide, also available on our website, on Amazon, an...