80,000 Hours Podcast

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 bioweapons humanity’s single greatest vulnerability. Andrew Snyder-Beattie thinks conventional wisdom could be wrong. Andrew’s job at Open Phi

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 security issue. We thought it was such a good interview and we wanted more people to see it, so we’re cross-posting it here on The 80,000 Hours Podc

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 companies. His secret? “It’s mostly luck,” he says, but “another part is what I think of as maximising my luck surface area.” Video, full tran

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 to wield enormous cultural influence, directly advise on major government decisions, and even operate military equipment autonomously. We simpl

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 welfare researcher — something consistently strange: the models immediately begin discussing their own consciousness before spiraling into incr

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 video, drive a taxi more safely than humans, and do accurate medical diagnosis. And over the next five years, it’s set to continue to improve rapid