This startlingly fast progress in LLMs was driven both by scaling up LLMs and doing schlep to make usable systems out of them. We think scale and schlep will both improve rapidly: planned-obsolescence.org/scale-schlep-and-systemsBy Ajeya Cotra, Kelsey Piper

A short introduction to what you'll get out of these episodes!By 80000 Hours

Originally released in March 2021. Brian Christian is a bestselling author with a particular knack for accurately communicating difficult or technical ideas from both mathematics and computer science. Listeners loved our episode about his book Algorithms to Live By — so when the team read his new book, The Alignment Problem, and found it to be an i…

Originally released in May 2023. Imagine you are an orphaned eight-year-old whose parents left you a $1 trillion company, and no trusted adult to serve as your guide to the world. You have to hire a smart adult to run that company, guide your life the way that a parent would, and administer your vast wealth. You have to hire that adult based on a w…

Originally released in October 2018. Paul Christiano is one of the smartest people I know. After our first session produced such great material, we decided to do a second recording, resulting in our longest interview so far. While challenging at times I can strongly recommend listening - Paul works on AI himself and has a very unusually thought thr…

Can there be a more exciting and strange place to work today than a leading AI lab? Your CEO has said they're worried your research could cause human extinction. The government is setting up meetings to discuss how this outcome can be avoided. Some of your colleagues think this is all overblown; others are more anxious still. Today's guest — machin…

Originally released in August 2021. Chris Olah has had a fascinating and unconventional career path. Most people who want to pursue a research career feel they need a degree to get taken seriously. But Chris not only doesn't have a PhD, but doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree. After dropping out of university to help defend an acquaintance wh…

Originally released in December 2022. Large language models like GPT-3, and now ChatGPT, are neural networks trained on a large fraction of all text available on the internet to do one thing: predict the next word in a passage. This simple technique has led to something extraordinary — black boxes able to write TV scripts, explain jokes, produce sa…

Originally released in July 2020. 80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has argued that helping to positively shape the development of artificial intelligence may be one of the best ways to have a lasting, positive impact on the long-term future. Millions of dollars in philanthropic spending, as well as lot…

Originally released in May 2023. It’s easy to dismiss alarming AI-related predictions when you don’t know where the numbers came from. For example: what if we told you that within 15 years, it’s likely that we’ll see a 1,000x improvement in AI capabilities in a single year? And what if we then told you that those improvements would lead to explosiv…

Originally released in July 2019. From 1870 to 1950, the introduction of electricity transformed life in the US and UK, as people gained access to lighting, radio and a wide range of household appliances for the first time. Electricity turned out to be a general purpose technology that could help with almost everything people did. Some think this i…

Originally released in June 2022. If a business has spent $100 million developing a product, it's a fair bet that they don't want it stolen in two seconds and uploaded to the web where anyone can use it for free. This problem exists in extreme form for AI companies. These days, the electricity and equipment required to train cutting-edge machine le…

Originally released in November 2018. After dropping out of a machine learning PhD at Stanford, Daniel Ziegler needed to decide what to do next. He’d always enjoyed building stuff and wanted to shape the development of AI, so he thought a research engineering position at an org dedicated to aligning AI with human interests could be his best option.…

Originally released in August 2022. Today’s release is a professional reading of our new problem profile on preventing an AI-related catastrophe, written by Benjamin Hilton. We expect that there will be substantial progress in AI in the next few decades, potentially even to the point where machines come to outperform humans in many, if not all, tas…

Article originally published February 2022. In this episode of 80k After Hours, Perrin Walker reads our career review of China-related AI safety and governance paths. Here’s the original piece if you’d like to learn more. You might also want to check out Benjamin Todd and Brian Tse's article on Improving China-Western coordination on global catastr…

Most experts were surprised by progress in language models in 2022 and 2023. There may be more surprises ahead, so experts should register their forecasts now about 2024 and 2025: https://planned-obsolescence.org/language-models-surprised-usBy Ajeya Cotra, Kelsey Piper

Most new technologies don’t accelerate the pace of economic growth. But advanced AI might do this by massively increasing the research effort going into developing new technologies.By Ajeya Cotra, Kelsey Piper

Both AI fears and AI hopes rest on the belief that it may be possible to build alien minds that can do everything we can do and much more. AI-driven technological progress could save countless lives and make everyone massively healthier and wealthier: https://planned-obsolescence.org/the-costs-of-caution…

Once a lab trains AI that can fully replace its human employees, it will be able to multiply its workforce 100,000x. If these AIs do AI research, they could develop vastly superhuman systems in under a year: https://planned-obsolescence.org/continuous-doesnt-mean-slowBy Ajeya Cotra, Kelsey Piper

Researchers could potentially design the next generation of ML models more quickly by delegating some work to existing models, creating a feedback loop of ever-accelerating progress. https://planned-obsolescence.org/ais-accelerating-ai-researchBy Ajeya Cotra, Kelsey Piper

The single most important thing we can do is to pause when the next model we train would be powerful enough to obsolete humans entirely. If it were up to me, I would slow down AI development starting now — and then later slow down even more: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/is-it-time-for-a-pause/…

We’re trying to think ahead to a possible future in which AI is making all the most important decisions: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/what-were-doing-here/By Ajeya Cotra

Perfect alignment just means that AI systems won’t want to deliberately disregard their designers' intent; it's not enough to ensure AI is good for the world: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/aligned-vs-good/By Ajeya Cotra

AI systems that have a precise understanding of how they’ll be evaluated and what behavior we want them to display will earn more reward than AI systems that don’t: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/situational-awareness/By Ajeya Cotra

We're creating incentives for AI systems to make their behavior look as desirable as possible, while intentionally disregarding human intent when that conflicts with maximizing reward: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/the-training-game/By Ajeya Cotra

If we can accurately recognize good performance on alignment, we could elicit lots of useful alignment work from our models, even if they're playing the training game: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/training-ais-to-help-us-align-ais/By Ajeya Cotra

Many fellow alignment researchers may be operating under radically different assumptions from you: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/disagreement-in-alignment/By Ajeya Cotra

If we’ve decided we’re collectively fine with unleashing millions of spam bots, then the least we can do is actually study what they can – and can’t – do: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/ethics-of-red-teaming/By Ajeya Cotra

'Effective Altruism: An Introduction' is a collection of ten top episodes of The 80,000 Hours Podcast specifically selected to help listeners quickly get up to speed on the school of thought known as effective altruism. Here the host of the show — Rob Wiblin — briefly explains what effective altruism is all about, and what to expect from the rest o…

The Green Revolution averted mass famine during the 20th century. The contraceptive pill gave women unprecedented freedom in planning their own lives. Both are widely recognised as scientific breakthroughs that transformed the world. But few know that those breakthroughs only happened when they did because of a philanthropist willing to take a risk…

Of all the people whose well-being we should care about, only a small fraction are alive today. The rest are members of future generations who are yet to exist. Whether they’ll be born into a world that is flourishing or disintegrating – and indeed, whether they will ever be born at all – is in large part up to us. As such, the welfare of future ge…

The effective altruist research community tries to identify the highest impact things people can do to improve the world. Unsurprisingly, given the difficulty of such a massive and open-ended project, very different schools of thought have arisen about how to do the most good. Today’s guest, Alexander Berger, leads Open Philanthropy’s ‘Global Healt…

Will SpaceX land people on Mars in the next decade? Will North Korea give up their nuclear weapons? Will your friend turn up to dinner? Spencer Greenberg, founder of ClearerThinking.org has a process for working out such real life problems. In this conversation from 2018, Spencer walks us through how to reason through difficult questions more accur…

Immanuel Kant is a profoundly influential figure in modern philosophy, and was one of the earliest proponents for universal democracy and international cooperation. He also thought that women have no place in civil society, that it was okay to kill illegitimate children, and that there was a ranking in the moral worth of different races. Throughout…

Imagine that humanity has two possible futures ahead of it: Either we’re going to have a huge future like that, in which trillions of people ultimately exist, or we’re going to wipe ourselves out quite soon, thereby ensuring that only around 100 billion people ever get to live. If there are eventually going to be 1,000 trillion humans, what should …

Have you ever been infuriated by a doctor's unwillingness to give you an honest, probabilistic estimate about what to expect? Or a lawyer who won't tell you the chances you'll win your case? Their behaviour is so frustrating because accurately predicting the future is central to every action we take. If we can't assess the likelihood of different o…

The barista gives you your coffee and change, and you walk away from the busy line. But you suddenly realise she gave you $1 less than she should have. Do you brush your way past the people now waiting, or just accept this as a dollar you’re never getting back? According to philosophy Professor Hilary Greaves - Director of Oxford University's Globa…

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is about “the world’s most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them”, and in this episode we tackle that question in the most direct way possible. In 2019 we published a summary of all our key ideas, which links to many of our other articles, and which we are aiming to keep updated as our opinions shi…

Is effective altruism just about donating money to fight poverty? Does it include a moral obligation to give? How do you talk about it to people who've never heard of it? In this conversation from 2020, Arden Koehler and 80,000 Hours CEO Ben Todd cover a bunch of topics related to effective altruism. We also have an article on misconceptions about …

Now you've finished Effective Altruism: An Introduction, here's what we suggest you do next. And if you’ve listened to this series and found the ideas resonated with you, our one-on-one team might be able to help you apply them to your career. We can talk to you about career options, make introductions in your chosen fields, and help you work out n…