80,000 Hours Podcast
Unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them. Subscribe by searching for '80000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts. Hosted by Rob Wiblin and Luisa Rodriguez.
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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 Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company suggests OpenAI’s restructuring faces serious legal threats, which will complicate its efforts to raise
#139 Classic episode – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value
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 you win $8, the fourth you win $16, and so on. How much should you be willing to pay to play? The standard way of analysing gambling problems, ‘
#143 Classic episode – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons
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, founder of Arms Control Wonk and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies — explains, in its official 'OPLANs' (military o
#212 – Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable & how to shape AI development anyway
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 frontier safety and governance at Google DeepMind — explains one of the deepest patterns in technological history: once a powerful new capabilit
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 freedom to stick with its current charitable mission. For a normal company takeover bid, this would already be spicy. But OpenAI’s unique str
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 it will feel like something to be a superhuman AGI? With AGI back in the headlines, we bring you 15 opinionated highlights from the show addres
