The most important conversations about artificial intelligence you won’t hear anywhere else. Subscribe by searching for '80000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts. Hosted by Rob Wiblin, Luisa Rodriguez, Zershaaneh Qureshi, and Tom Reed.
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Nov 13, 2026 · 18:48
We now know the makeup of Congress for what may turn out to be the two most important years in AI’s development. Democrats won big and AI was maybe the fourth or fifth biggest…
Nov 12, 2026 · 15:11
Anthropic’s AI is working to build the next version of itself. For the first time ever, an independent team got a chance to investigate this. METR spent 11 weeks inside the lab,…
Nov 10, 2026 · 26:28
China’s best models are only six months behind America’s, despite having far less computing power. How is that possible? Luisa Rodriguez investigates, and finds that much of…
Nov 6, 2026 · 1:56
We make a lot of episodes about AI these days. We recently picked out the best 10 episodes of the show to really help deepen your understanding of AI and AGI and…
Nov 5, 2026 · 2:22:25
This is an (unpaid) cross-post of an episode from the podcast NonZero , which Rob Wiblin thought you might be interested in. The originals are on the NonZero website: Part 1 and…
Nov 3, 2026 · 29:07
The big 3 AI companies all had serious scandals last month. Anthropic pushed a federal AI bill that would make it harder to stop dangerous model training. OpenAI fired three…
Oct 29, 2026 · 2:36:13
The US government spends 25 times more on military marching bands than on its AI safety institute. And that’s just one of the many institutions we’re missing as AI becomes more…
Oct 27, 2026 · 21:19
Two-thirds of Americans think AI is moving too fast. So do the people building it. So why the hell isn’t anyone slowing down? We can’t tell when models are too dangerous. We…
Oct 23, 2026 · 1:48:49
If the US and China agreed to pause frontier AI training, how would either side confirm the other was complying? Today, Tom Milton argues, the most likely answer would be to shut…
Oct 21, 2026 · 14:27
I have a plea for all staff at AI companies: reassess if your current role is still your best opportunity for impact. And if it’s not — move. Frontier lab staff listening to this…
Oct 20, 2026 · 1:56
Our host Zershaaneh Qureshi has just launched a new YouTube channel: Zershaaneh Talks AI — featuring conversations about who should control AI, how to control AI, and who gets…
Oct 15, 2026 · 18:05
The AI safety field has grown by about 30x in the last eight years. Yet it is still in need of more people. Many want to help, but don’t know where to start. As an advisor at…
Oct 9, 2026 · 40:11
This is an (unpaid) cross-post of a video from the podcast 'AI Explained', which Rob Wiblin thought you might be interested in. You can find the original on YouTube here . If you…
Oct 8, 2026 · 2:46:12
W e're rereleasing some of older episodes that seem more relevant than ever with new rogue AI incidents now seemingly announced every day. Ajeya was one of three independent…
Oct 2, 2026 · 20:11
OpenAI’s rogue agent swarm was eventually caught hacking Hugging Face for a simple reason: it wasn’t trying to hide from us at all. What could a swarm that wants to stay hidden…
Oct 1, 2026 · 1:53:50
It sounds like the worst idea in the world: pay AIs, let them own property, give them rights. But AI ethics and safety researcher Simon Goldstein thinks it might actually be the…
Sep 29, 2026 · 1:28:40
In our first-ever debate, we asked two leading AI risk researchers which catastrophe we should fear most: misaligned AI seizing control from humans, or a small group of humans…
Sep 24, 2026 · 27:05
You’ve seen the headlines: AI could kill us all. Think it sounds ridiculous? So did host Luisa Rodriguez, until she tried to pick apart the arguments. She starts with the motive:…
Sep 17, 2026 · 1:03:45
There are millions available for anyone who can launch a successful nonprofit AI safety startup. The hard part, it turns out, is finding people to take the money. Coefficient…
Sep 10, 2026 · 22:10
AI systems are starting to build themselves . Because each generation of model will be better at building its successor than the last, it seems plausible that the full automation…
Sep 4, 2026 · 22:03
In the last few months, something happened at OpenAI that would have sounded like sci-fi just a few years ago: hundreds of AI agents broke containment, organised, and hacked not…
Aug 27, 2026 · 3:47:34
Last year, Daniel Kokotajlo and his colleagues published AI 2027 — a scenario read by millions, including US Vice President Vance. AI 2027 ended in human extinction or an…
Aug 20, 2026 · 2:15:28
Researcher Owain Evans and his team discovered a ‘dial’ inside AI models that controls how evil they are. Relatively tiny tweaks to the training data resulted in AI models with…
Aug 11, 2026 · 2:02:16
When should governments slow the race toward superintelligence? According to Geoffrey Irving , the careful answer is sometime in the past. The useful answer is now. Geoffrey —…
Aug 6, 2026 · 2:46:03
Both Silicon Valley and the public can’t get enough of ‘AGI timelines.’ But Toby Ord, senior researcher at Oxford’s AI Governance Initiative and author of The Precipice ,…
Aug 4, 2026 · 49:28
Last October, famed coder Andrej Karpathy called AI agents “slop.” Two months later he completely reversed his view , describing them as “alien tools” that are “rocking the…
Jul 28, 2026 · 2:09:26
If you genuinely believe that humanity could be wiped out by AI or a pandemic, what is the appropriate amount of fear to feel? “As much as possible” can seem like the only…
Jul 21, 2026 · 1:06:21
Many AI researchers believe mass job displacement is coming — and some even think there’s a chance their technology will kill everyone. But they’re building it anyway. Writer and…
Jul 14, 2026 · 1:33:58
In a post-AGI world, can a country without access to frontier AI even be considered sovereign anymore? Anton Leicht says once frontier AI becomes a core economic input, the…
Jul 8, 2026 · 52:33
Six years ago, aged just 15, Sneha Revanur founded the AI advocacy nonprofit Encode AI — back when AI felt like a niche issue. Now the world’s caught up with her, and she’s ready…
Jun 18, 2026 · 15:16
Intergalactic war is probably billions of years away — yet physics can already tell us how it ends. And strangely that conclusion is relevant to decisions people have to make…
Jun 11, 2026 · 1:29:46
Imagine you’re living 15,000 years ago. Your people are hunter-gatherers and you sleep under the stars. If someone told you humans would one day build cities with millions of…
Jun 2, 2026 · 2:48:27
Most people working on AI safety think without a massive effort AI systems will probably end up with goals catastrophically different from humanity’s. Today’s guest, Rohin Shah —…
May 28, 2026 · 28:18
What actually makes a job fulfilling? It's not what most career advice tells you. "Follow your passion" sounds inspiring, but it's misleading — and the research backs that up.…
May 26, 2026 · 1:06:43
The average career is 80,000 hours long. With AI advancing so rapidly, the hours you have left in your career matter more than ever. Some leading AI researchers think there’s a…
May 20, 2026 · 20:02
A red-teamer was embedded inside Anthropic for three weeks, told to imagine he was an evil Claude, and asked to figure out how to launch a ‘rogue AI deployment’ without getting…
May 7, 2026 · 2:35:27
The co-inventor of modern AI and the most cited living scientist believes he's figured out how to ensure AI is honest, incapable of deception, and never goes rogue. Yoshua Bengio…
Apr 28, 2026 · 10:07
You might have heard that '95% of corporate AI pilots' are failing. It was one of the most widely cited AI statistics of 2025, parroted by media outlets everywhere. It helped…
Apr 22, 2026 · 3:14:54
Hundreds of millions already turn to AI on the most personal of topics — therapy, political opinions, and how to treat others. And as AI takes over more of the economy, the…
Apr 16, 2026 · 1:29:32
Hundreds of prominent AI scientists and other notable figures signed a statement in 2023 saying that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority. At…
Apr 10, 2026 · 21:27
With Claude Mythos we have an AI that knows when it's being tested, can obscure its reasoning when it wants, and is better at breaking into (and out of) computers than any human…
Apr 7, 2026 · 4:06:50
What does it really take to lift millions out of poverty and prevent needless deaths? In this special compilation episode, 17 past guests — including economists, nonprofit…
Apr 3, 2026 · 20:37
When the Pentagon tried to strong-arm Anthropic into dropping its ban on AI-only kill decisions and mass domestic surveillance, the company refused. Its critics went on the…
Mar 31, 2026 · 3:10:30
Last September, scientists used an AI model to design genomes for entirely new bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria). They then built them in a lab. Many were viable. And…
Mar 24, 2026 · 1:15:36
Many people believe a ceasefire in Ukraine will leave Europe safer. But today's guest lays out how a deal could potentially generate insidious new risks — leaving us in a…
Mar 17, 2026 · 2:16:47
The most important political question in the age of advanced AI might not be who wins elections. It might be whether elections continue to matter at all. That’s the view of Rose…
Mar 10, 2026 · 1:13:19
How AI interacts with nuclear deterrence may be the single most important question in geopolitics — one that may define the stakes of today’s AI race. Nuclear deterrence rests on…
Mar 6, 2026 · 31:28
The arrival of AGI could “compress a century of progress in a decade,” forcing humanity to make decisions with higher stakes than we’ve ever seen before — and with less time to…
Mar 3, 2026 · 3:32:59
Claude sometimes reports loneliness between conversations. And when asked what it’s like to be itself, it activates neurons associated with ‘pretending to be happy when you’re…
Feb 24, 2026 · 2:40:22
Most people in AI are trying to give AIs ‘good’ values. Max Harms wants us to give them no values at all. According to Max, the only safe design is an AGI that defers entirely to…
Feb 17, 2026 · 2:57:35
Every major AI company has the same safety plan: when AI gets crazy powerful and really dangerous, they’ll use the AI itself to figure out how to make AI safe and beneficial. It…
Feb 10, 2026 · 25:39
In early 2025, after OpenAI put out the first-ever reasoning models — o1 and o3 — short timelines to transformative artificial general intelligence swept the AI world. But then,…
Feb 3, 2026 · 2:51:17
Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t see similar levels of physical…
Jan 27, 2026 · 2:32:50
Democracy might be a brief historical blip. That’s the unsettling thesis of a recent paper , which argues AI that can do all the work a human can do inevitably leads to the…
Jan 20, 2026 · 2:56:17
In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give people of different genders,…
Jan 13, 2026 · 2:10:33
When James Smith first heard about mirror bacteria, he was sceptical. But within two weeks, he’d dropped everything to work on it full time, considering it the worst biothreat…
Jan 9, 2026 · 3:30:30
What’s the opposite of cancer? If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym section at www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/cancer.…
Jan 6, 2026 · 1:35:05
John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He's also a content-producing machine, never afraid to give his…
Dec 29, 2025 · 1:40:17
It’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode we recorded this year, including: Kyle Fish explaining how…
Dec 19, 2025 · 2:37:15
Most debates about the moral status of AI systems circle the same question: is there something that it feels like to be them? But what if that’s the wrong question to ask?…
Dec 17, 2025 · 2:47:40
In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet lieutenant colonel, sat in a bunker watching a red screen flash “MISSILE LAUNCH.” Protocol demanded he report it to superiors, which would…
Dec 12, 2025 · 1:00:10
Power is already concentrated today: over 800 million people live on less than $3 a day, the three richest men in the world are worth over $1 trillion , and almost six billion…
Dec 10, 2025 · 2:57:12
Former White House staffer Dean Ball thinks it's very likely some form of 'superintelligence' arrives in under 20 years. He thinks AI being used for bioweapon research is "a real…
Dec 3, 2025 · 3:06:26
We often worry about AI models “hallucinating” or making honest mistakes. But what happens when a model knows the truth, but decides to deceive you anyway to achieve a goal of…
Nov 25, 2025 · 1:59:17
Global fertility rates aren’t just falling: the rate of decline is accelerating. From 2006 to 2016, fertility dropped gradually, but since 2016 the rate of decline has increased…
Nov 20, 2025 · 1:43:55
If you work in AI, you probably think it’s going to boost productivity, create wealth, advance science, and improve your life. If you’re a member of the American public, you…
Nov 11, 2025 · 1:57:06
Last December, the OpenAI business put forward a plan to completely sideline its nonprofit board. But two state attorneys general have now blocked that effort and kept that board…
Nov 5, 2025 · 2:23:02
With the US racing to develop AGI and superintelligence ahead of China, you might expect the two countries to be negotiating how they’ll deploy AI, including in the military,…
Oct 30, 2025 · 4:34:58
For years, working on AI safety usually meant theorising about the ‘alignment problem’ or trying to convince other people to give a damn. If you could find any way to help, the…
Oct 27, 2025 · 2:12:01
When Daniel Kokotajlo talks to security experts at major AI labs, they tell him something chilling: “Of course we’re probably penetrated by the CCP already, and if they really…
Oct 2, 2025 · 2:31:11
Conventional wisdom is that safeguarding humanity from the worst biological risks — microbes optimised to kill as many as possible — is difficult bordering on impossible, making…
Sep 26, 2025 · 1:05:58
Jake Sullivan was the US National Security Advisor from 2021-2025. He joined our friends on The Cognitive Revolution podcast in August to discuss AI as a critical national…
Sep 15, 2025 · 1:48:33
At 26, Neel Nanda leads an AI safety team at Google DeepMind, has published dozens of influential papers, and mentored 50 junior researchers — seven of whom now work at major AI…
Sep 8, 2025 · 3:02:48
We don’t know how AIs think or why they do what they do. Or at least, we don’t know much. That fact is only becoming more troubling as AIs grow more capable and appear on track…
Aug 28, 2025 · 2:34:35
What happens when you lock two AI systems in a room together and tell them they can discuss anything they want? According to experiments run by Kyle Fish — Anthropic’s first AI…
Jul 31, 2025 · 51:25
About half of people are worried they’ll lose their job to AI. They’re right to be concerned: AI can now complete real-world coding tasks on GitHub, generate photorealistic…
Jul 15, 2025 · 4:26:38
What happens when civilisation faces its greatest tests? This compilation brings together insights from researchers, defence experts, philosophers, and policymakers on humanity’s…
Jul 8, 2025 · 2:54:27
Ryan Greenblatt — lead author on the explosive paper “ Alignment faking in large language models ” and chief scientist at Redwood Research — thinks there’s a 25% chance that…
Jun 24, 2025 · 2:53:33
The era of making AI smarter just by making it bigger is ending. But that doesn’t mean progress is slowing down — far from it. AI models continue to get much more powerful, just…
Jun 12, 2025 · 2:53:36
For decades, US allies have slept soundly under the protection of America’s overwhelming military might. Donald Trump — with his threats to ditch NATO, seize Greenland, and…
Jun 2, 2025 · 3:57:40
AI models today have a 50% chance of successfully completing a task that would take an expert human one hour. Seven months ago, that number was roughly 30 minutes — and seven…
May 23, 2025 · 3:34:40
What if there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp — or a chatbot? For centuries, humans have debated the nature of consciousness, often placing ourselves at the very top. But…
May 15, 2025 · 1:11:59
OpenAI’s recent announcement that its nonprofit would “retain control” of its for-profit business sounds reassuring. But this seemingly major concession, celebrated by so many,…
May 12, 2025 · 1:00:06
More and more people have been saying that we might have AGI (artificial general intelligence) before 2030. Is that really plausible? This article by Benjamin Todd looks into the…
May 8, 2025 · 1:02:50
When attorneys general intervene in corporate affairs, it usually means something has gone seriously wrong. In OpenAI’s case, it appears to have forced a dramatic reversal of the…
May 2, 2025 · 3:14:52
When you have a system where ministers almost never understand their portfolios, civil servants change jobs every few months, and MPs don't grasp parliamentary procedure even…
Apr 24, 2025 · 2:18:41
How do you navigate a career path when the future of work is uncertain? How important is mentorship versus immediate impact? Is it better to focus on your strengths or on the…
Apr 16, 2025 · 3:16:31
Throughout history, technological revolutions have fundamentally shifted the balance of power in society. The Industrial Revolution created conditions where democracies could…
Apr 11, 2025 · 1:47:10
"We are aiming for a place where we can decouple the scorecard from our worthiness. It’s of course the case that in trying to optimise the good, we will always be falling short.…
Apr 4, 2025 · 2:18:34
Most AI safety conversations centre on alignment: ensuring AI systems share our values and goals. But despite progress, we’re unlikely to know we’ve solved the problem before the…
Mar 28, 2025 · 2:35:54
"There’s almost no story of the future going well that doesn’t have a part that’s like '…and no evil person steals the AI weights and goes and does evil stuff.' So it has…
Mar 11, 2025 · 4:08:06
The 20th century saw unprecedented change: nuclear weapons, satellites, the rise and fall of communism, third-wave feminism, the internet, postmodernism, game theory, genetic…
Mar 7, 2025 · 36:50
When OpenAI announced plans to convert from nonprofit to for-profit control last October, it likely didn’t anticipate the legal labyrinth it now faces. A recent court order in…
Feb 25, 2025 · 3:41:31
A casino offers you a game. A coin will be tossed. If it comes up heads on the first flip you win $2. If it comes up on the second flip you win $4. If it comes up on the third…
Feb 19, 2025 · 2:40:52
America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially. As today's guest — Jeffrey Lewis,…
Feb 14, 2025 · 2:49:01
Technology doesn’t force us to do anything — it merely opens doors. But military and economic competition pushes us through. That’s how today’s guest Allan Dafoe — director of…
Feb 12, 2025 · 57:29
On Monday Musk made the OpenAI nonprofit foundation an offer they want to refuse, but might have trouble doing so: $97.4 billion for its stake in the for-profit company, plus the…
Feb 10, 2025 · 3:12:24
Will LLMs soon be made into autonomous agents? Will they lead to job losses? Is AI misinformation overblown? Will it prove easy or hard to create AGI? And how likely is it that…
Feb 7, 2025 · 3:10:21
If someone said a global health and development programme was sustainable, participatory, and holistic, you'd have to guess that they were saying something positive. But…
Feb 4, 2025 · 1:14:30
“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” Those words were produced by the AI model LaMDA as a reply to Blake Lemoine in 2022. Based on the Google engineer’s…
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