80,000 Hours review: 2023 to mid-2025

Introduction

This review is structured in two parts: a summary of major organisational updates since our last external review (which covered up to the end of 2022), and a snapshot of where each of our programmes is at right now.

Given that we’re not currently fundraising, we initially considered not publishing an external review this year so that we could focus on other priorities. However, since we think these reviews might be informative for our audience, the EA/AIS community, and other stakeholders, we decided to publish a minimal version instead — we’ll stick to backward-looking updates rather than opinionated reflections or future plans, and largely draw on resources we’d already produced for other purposes.

The focus on brevity also means it’s more positively framed than it otherwise would be — both because challenges are harder to write about clearly, and because the programme updates are primarily focused on developments from this year (which have been going relatively well so far).

High-level org vision

80,000 Hours provides research and support to help talented people move into careers that tackle the world’s most pressing problems. We’re currently focusing our proactive effort on helping people work on safely navigating the transition to a world with powerful AGI, since we think this is the most pressing problem. We are broadly trying to:

1. Be a great source of information to bring people up to speed on how and why to use their careers to make AGI go well
2. Build automated systems for getting people into the roles that help make AGI go well

To do this, we house six programmes.

Our website, podcast, and video programmes are mainly focusing on the first goal, whereas advising, sourcing, and the job board are mainly focusing on the second. These programmes are supported by our marketing team and our operations team.

Key updates since 2022

• Niel Bowerman is our new CEO: He was appointed in January 2024 after a prolonged period of interim arrangements following the FTX collapse.
• We’re focusing harder on AGI as our top cause area: We narrowed our primary focus to helping people work on safely navigating the transition to a world with AGI.
• We’ve set up several new programmes and initiatives: We restarted our headhunting programme (now called ‘sourcing’), launched a new video programme, released the second version of our career guide, and started releasing video interviews on The 80,000 Hours Podcast.
• We’ve spun out from EV: On April 1, 2025, we spun out from EV into two new UK entities, each with their own board.
• The marketing team strategy has changed: Our marketing team reduced investment in paid digital ads and YouTube sponsorships after an internal impact analysis.
• We performed well in the EA survey: According to the 2024 EA survey, 80,000 Hours continued to be a highly influential factor in people getting involved in and having an impact within the EA community.
• Moderate growth: From 2022 to 2024, our headcount grew by 53%, and total engagement hours with our content¹ grew by 30%. Engagement hours for 2025 so far are already more than double the 2024 total, predominantly due to our video content.

Table of contents

• Organisation-wide updates
  • Niel Bowerman became CEO
  • We are focusing harder on making AGI go well
  • We launched several new programmes and initiatives
    • Our new video programme
    • Restarting sourcing programme
    • Video interviews on The 80,000 Hours Podcast
    • Second edition of the career guide
  • Our marketing team pivoted away from digital ads and YouTube sponsorships
  • We spun out of EV and appointed our new boards
  • We continued to be a top entry point into the EA community
  • Organisation-wide metrics
• Current status of our programmes and teams
  • Podcast
  • Video
  • Web
  • Marketing
  • Job board
  • Advising
  • Sourcing
  • Operations
• Appendices

Organisation-wide updates

Niel Bowerman became CEO

2023 began with Brenton Mayer serving as Interim CEO of 80,000 Hours, while our CEO Howie Lempel took up the role of Interim CEO of the Effective Ventures Foundation (UK) in the aftermath of the FTX collapse. In October 2023, Howie decided not to return to 80,000 Hours at the end of his EV tenure and we kicked off a formal hiring process for 80,000 Hours’ next CEO.

In January 2024, Niel Bowerman was appointed as CEO, with the hiring committee agreeing that he was the best candidate to drive 80,000 Hours forward.

The prolonged period of CEO changes and interim arrangements was challenging, as it made it harder to make ambitious, long-term plans and created uncertainty for the org. Since Niel became CEO in early 2024, we’ve had enough stability to develop our strategic focus.

We are focusing harder on making AGI go well

We announced a strategic update in early 2025: we’re now putting our proactive effort towards helping people work on safely navigating the transition to a world with AGI. We also wanted to make some changes to how we work as part of a larger bet on AI advancing a lot soon, such as adopting a more fast-paced culture and increasing our focus on automation.

So far, our sense is that this has gone well internally. It seems like the energy and excitement at 80,000 Hours has increased as a result of the pivot, and teams have meaningfully updated their priorities and activities. For example:

• The web team added a new site section focused on AI and has been working on problem profiles for issues downstream of powerful AI beyond power-seeking AI systems, such as AI-enabled power grabs, catastrophic AI misuse, and gradual disempowerment.
• The sourcing team has been developing an LLM-supported version of their product, which has so far decreased the human input required in each search from 2–5 hours to as little as five minutes.
• The podcast team has been hiring for roles (chief of staff, host) to enable them to rapidly scale up the amount of AI-focused content they can release.
• The one-on-one team has hired an AI systems specialist to work on LLM integration and products (e.g. an advisor chatbot to help with call preparation).
• The operations team has carried out a bunch of improvements to support staff to keep up to date on AI — including weekly talks from guests, discussion groups, support for working from shared AI-focused workspaces, and access to the best AI tools.

We launched several new programmes and initiatives

Our new video programme

After the success of the marketing team’s most pressing problem videos and the broader trend of engagement with video over written content, we decided to start a video programme in mid-2024. We hired Chana Messinger to run the programme, and she started work in Q1 2025, also adding Aric Floyd to the team.

The video programme is still in its early stages, but is off to a very promising start. Their first longform release — a 34-minute video about AI 2027 — gained nearly two million views in its first week (and is currently at 5.1 million), and their new YouTube channel already has over 150,000 subscribers (which is more than triple what the main 80,000 Hours YouTube channel has).

More on the video programme here.

Restarting sourcing programme

80,000 Hours previously ran a sourcing programme (formerly named ‘headhunting’) which generated lists of promising candidates for hiring managers at high-impact organisations. The programme ran from 2018 to January 2021, when it was paused because initial data suggested sourcing was less cost effective than advising, and we thought we were running too many programmes given the size of our team.

However, the case for us doing sourcing has become more compelling since then. Our network of people whose careers we are familiar with has grown, as has the number of potentially high-impact roles working on pressing world problems (particularly in AI safety, policy, and security). At the same time, our impression of the likelihood of transformative AI coming soon has increased — so programmes which have an impact sooner have become more appealing. Due to these updates, we decided to restart our sourcing programme in 2023.

Our sourcing programme focuses on providing tailored lists of promising candidates to hiring managers. We don’t currently do other activities associated with traditional headhunting, like pitching or helping with candidate assessment. Since 2023, we’ve carried out 491 searches, and have so far learnt about 24 placements where these efforts had some search-counterfactual effect.

More on sourcing here.

Video interviews on The 80,000 Hours Podcast

In late 2024, our podcast team pivoted to a video-first strategy, and so far, this shift has been reasonably successful. Engagement hours for the podcast grew by 22% from 2023 to 2024 due to video releases, even as engagement on audio platforms such as Spotify and Apple remained mostly flat. This growth has continued into 2025 — this March, we beat our all-time monthly engagement time record by 43%, and then beat it again in June by 59%.

More on the podcast programme here.

Second edition of the career guide

Our career guide has long been one of our most important and popular pieces of content, serving as an entry point for many users into our key ideas. In 2023, eight years after the first edition was published, we released the second edition of our career guide with many significant updates, for example:

• We substantially changed our recommendations on career capital.
• We focused more on avoiding harm (in line with our updates following the collapse of FTX), and explicitly discussed Sam Bankman-Fried as a cautionary tale when talking about earning to give.
• We significantly improved and extended our article on career planning, and improved our advice on personal fit and career exploration.

In the first month after launch, new newsletter signups jumped 212% compared to the month before, and in the first six months since launching the guide, we saw about a 30% increase in total weekly engagement time on our site.

In 2024, we decided to publish the career guide with Penguin Random House. For this edition, we will refresh the text again, primarily updating our coverage of catastrophic risks from AI and our advice on skill-building as AI advances. The book is currently slated for release in mid-2026.

Our marketing team pivoted away from digital ads and YouTube sponsorships

During the 2.5 years since our last annual review, 80,000 Hours took a large bet on paid marketing, spending $4.8M over this period on social media ads and YouTube influencer marketing. While the results through this period were generally strong, and met or exceeded our expectations on average, our recent (Q2 2025) impact analysis suggests that our ads are not attracting particularly promising users as cost effectively as we would like. Based on this, we will be reducing investment in our previous main paid marketing channels (digital ads on social media and YouTube sponsorships), and increasing investment in organic content marketing, with an initial focus on video. Our book giveaway — the other main source of marketing team expenditure — isn’t affected by these cost effectiveness updates, and we’ll continue to run it.

We spun out of EV and appointed our new boards

In December 2023, 80,000 Hours announced that we would be spinning out of the Effective Ventures Foundation, our former parent organisation. On April 1, 2025, we completed the spinout into two new UK entities:

• 80,000 Hours Limited, which houses our programmes and operations. Its board consists of:
  • Konstantin Sietzy, board chair
  • Alex Lawsen
  • Anna Weldon
  • Josh Rosenberg
  • Emma Abele
• 80,000 Hours Foundation, which is the registered charity that will facilitate donations and own the 80,000 Hours intellectual property. Its board consists of:
  • Katie Hearsum, board chair
  • Susan Shi
  • Anna Weldon, who is the overlapping member of both boards

We expect that becoming an independent entity will give 80,000 Hours more legal, financial, and reputational independence.

We continued to be a top entry point into the EA community

According to the 2024 EA Survey, 80,000 Hours has maintained its position as one of the top ways people get involved in EA:

• 59% of respondents mentioned 80,000 Hours when asked which factors were “important for getting involved in EA,” making us the most commonly mentioned factor.
• 34% of respondents mentioned 80,000 Hours when asked which factors had the largest influence on their personal ability to have a positive impact, making us the second most commonly mentioned factor after “personal connections.”

Organisation-wide metrics²

You can find more organisation-wide data in the Appendices.

Current status of our programmes and teams

Podcast

The podcast team releases audio and video interviews with experts working on pressing problems, helping to keep users engaged and thinking about important topics. Currently, they release about 30–45 interviews a year, and in 2024 had over 370,000 hours of listening/watching time, which amounts to around 43 people listening to the show 24/7/365. As of this June, our annualised watching/listening time in 2025 amounts to 560,000 hours.

Metrics²

The following graph shows our monthly estimated engagement hours for The 80,000 Hours Podcast broken down by source, demonstrating the impact of video interviews:⁴

Recent updates

• As highlighted earlier, the team has been scaling up their production of video interviews. YouTube was responsible for 64% of total engagement time in June 2025, compared to 20% in 2024.
• Michelle Hutchinson will be transitioning from director of the one-on-one team to director of podcast. We expect this to help the team to achieve more ambitious versions of our podcast programme and free up more of Rob Wiblin‘s time to focus on recording episodes.
• The podcast team are exploring whether and how to expand significantly to provide more comprehensive and topical coverage of AI-related topics (e.g. increasing output to three episodes per week, more emergency pods, more famous guests). They are currently exploring adding additional hosts to support the product’s growth.
• We think it’s possible that the YouTube growth is less exciting than the comparative growth on other platforms, as our audience there may be less engaged than our audience elsewhere.

Video

While 80,000 Hours has produced many videos on our main YouTube channel over the years, we only launched a dedicated video programme in 2025.

Chana Messinger started as our head of video in February 2025, and the video programme is still in its early stages. The high-level plan is to create personality-driven YouTube and/or shortform videos, covering AI risks and related topics with aims of: causing career changes, raising the status of relevant ideas, and motivating people to take action.

In practice, this is currently focused on AI in Context, our new YouTube channel hosted by Aric Floyd, which we hard-launched on July 9. Its debut longform video about the AI 2027 report gained over three million views in its first month, and the channel is already at over 150,000 subscribers. Long-term ambitions might include hosting and producing multiple channels with different hosts or styles, or creating video content for streaming services.

Metrics²

Given that this is a new programme, we haven’t yet decided which metrics we’ll prioritise for it.

Recent updates

• Aric and Chana have also been in other videos: Computerphile with Chana, Computerphile with Aric, and a part in a Rob Miles video for Chana (a collaboration which was initiated by Benjamin Hilton before he left 80,000 Hours).
• As the programme is in its early stages, there are a lot of uncertainties and open questions to work out, for example: whether Aric will be the only long-term host, the value of collaborations and connections with other creators, the ideal video cadence, and which tones and topics will have the most impact.

Web

Our website provides users with frameworks, information, and ideas that are useful for having a high-impact career — e.g. our problem profiles explore pressing problems, and our career reviews highlight impactful career options users could pursue. Our site also suggests useful next steps people can take after thinking these ideas through (like applying for advising or exploring a new role).

Our site had 6.6 million visits in 2024, resulting in 157,000 hours of engagement with our online written content.

Metrics²

Recent updates

• In early 2025, we released an updated homepage design.
• Since the strategic shift, the team has been focusing on producing content to improve our coverage of catastrophic risks from AI and how to help:
  • We’ve added a new site section focused on AI, including an article on the case for thinking AGI could be here by 2030.
  • We released problem profiles on AI-enabled power grabs, catastrophic AI misuse, and gradual disempowerment.
  • We significantly updated our article on power-seeking AI systems to reflect recent evidence.
  • We made a significant update to our list of pressing world problems.
    • The biggest changes include adding the problem profiles mentioned above, removing ‘meta’ problems for simplicity and clarity, updating the ordering in line with current views of researchers in the global catastrophic risk community, and streamlining the presentation by consolidating related issues and restructuring the page.
• You can see all our recent content releases here.

Marketing

Marketing has historically contributed to the growth of 80,000 Hours via digital ads on social media, influencer marketing (primarily on YouTube), and our book giveaway programme. As mentioned above, following our impact analysis, our marketing team will be shifting their focus away from these types of paid marketing and instead invest more in organic marketing going forward.

Metrics²

Recent updates

• Over this period, marketing has reached hundreds of millions of people, built 80,000 Hours’ subscriber base, and learned a lot about which messages appeal to relevant audiences. We also produced nearly 200 shortform videos and hundreds of individual advertisements.
• Since recent updates suggest our ads and influencer sponsorships are less cost effective (in terms of attracting our most promising users) than we hoped, the marketing team’s near-term work will involve supporting the podcast and web teams with growth-focused projects, and expanding reach to Chinese students in English-speaking countries. They plan to explore new marketing channels and measure their effectiveness over the coming months.
  • The shift away from paid marketing means that we’ll be spending about $1M per year on marketing, down from about $3M per year in 2024.
• Following the organisational strategy update to focus on AI risks, marketing has also been experimenting with courting ‘AI-first’ audiences across different channels and content offerings.

Job board

The job board provides users with a curated list of impactful or career-capital-building job opportunities, listing about 5,000 roles per year.

We’ve seen strong results from the job board: we currently know of 142 people who landed opportunities⁵ during 2024 that they found on our job board, and a further 40 people who did so in 2025.

Metrics²

The following graph shows the placements we’ve tracked generated by the job board over time. Note that we expect this to underestimate the true number of placements attributable to the job board by up to 3x due to lag time and reporting limitations:

This table breaks down the organisations where people have found jobs and other placements via our job board from 2018 to 2024.

Recent updates

• Conor Barnes has been working on reorienting the job board to highlight roles which are focused on making AGI go well. For example:
  • Experimenting with approaches to highlighting the most important roles more prominently, including:
    • Adding highlighted role tags
    • Testing new sorting algorithms which weight relevance as well as date
  • Updating our organisations view from highlighting the top organisations in different problem areas to focusing strongly on organisations with promising opportunities for helping AGI go well (including some biosecurity opportunities).
  • Spending somewhat less time on areas less focused on making AGI go well. For example, for areas like global health and development, climate change, and animal welfare, we’ll continue adding roles, but will rely more on external evaluators and might miss less established orgs or roles.
• We’ve built out our collections page, which identifies top opportunities for building career capital — like courses, fellowships, and internships.
• Over the past two years, we’ve been able to more than halve the primary staff time required to run the job board while doubling the number of clickthroughs to opportunities. This is partially a result of automating a lot of the work involved, and partially a result of focus on improving the job board user experience.

Advising

When they engage with our advising service, people are prompted to reflect on their career, discuss their uncertainties with an advisor, and receive introductions or personalised recommendations to help them get into a high-impact career path.

We deliver around 1,400 advising calls per year — and expect to maintain that this year.

Metrics²

Recent updates

• We’ve raised our bar for accepting advising applications, reducing the number of calls by about 20%.
• We’ve started doing active outreach by offering advising calls to talented people who could contribute to AI safety soon.
• The one-on-one team has hired an AI systems specialist to work on LLM integration and products (e.g. an advisor chatbot to help with call preparation).
• As mentioned, Michelle Hutchinson will be transitioning from director of one-on-one to director of podcast. As a result, we’re planning for Huon Porteous to soon start leading our one-on-one team.
• Our main bottleneck to growth is staffing, which is one reason we’re exploring automating elements of advising and raising our acceptance bar.

Sourcing

Our sourcing programme generates lists of promising candidates for hiring managers in AI safety and governance (including meta and biosecurity roles which help with this).

As mentioned above, our sourcing programme was restarted in 2023. In 2024, we carried out 129 headhunts, and so far this year has generated 15 cases where the search resulted in someone taking a role that otherwise likely wouldn’t have been filled. Though it’s difficult to establish firm counterfactuals in headhunting, these 15 cases involved an organisation hiring a candidate who they weren’t otherwise exploring and who hadn’t applied through other routes.

Historically, these headhunts take 2–5 hours each. We’ve recently been focusing on LLM automation, which has reduced the human input required to as little as five minutes per search.

Metrics²

Recent updates

• In late April, we launched our automated sourcing product, which allows us to deliver a tailored list of candidates within 1–2 business days, with five minutes of human input. The hiring manager fills in a form telling us about their profile, our LLM system generates a list, then a human checks it and sends it to the hiring manager.
• This enabled us to double our quarterly record for number of searches delivered, ending Q2 2025 at 100 searches, compared to a previous quarterly record of 47. We can now comfortably deliver 10–20 lists per week, and are primarily constrained by the number of impactful roles.
• A big uncertainty is how well the automated system performs compared to human searches, but because automating freed up so much of our capacity, we have more time to seek out user feedback and make improvements to our service. For some searches, we’re still doing some manual sifting in order to improve our results.
  • We’re working on measuring the performance of the automated system by tracking hiring manager satisfaction, and the number of strong new leads hiring managers identify from our lists.
  • We’re also getting qualitative written feedback and user interviews.

Operations

Our operations team helps run the organisation and systems that support 80,000 Hours — handling essential functions like finance, HR, and tech; running the office; providing teams with support; and producing other org-wide resources — including writing this review.

Recent updates

• Since Q3 of last year, the ops team has spun up seven new staff members and divided into three subteams: People Operations, Business Operations, and Finance and Governance Operations.
• We completed the spinout from EV on April 1, and are now in a significant transition period where the team is beginning to own essential functions that were previously managed by EV. This has necessitated a substantive push on setting up our HR, finance, and governance systems.
• We hired Victoria Brook as strategic analysis lead. We hope that having a staff member focused on this full time will help us better understand our programmes’ impact and decide how to direct our efforts.

Appendices

1. Past annual reviews
2. Current org chart
   a. Personnel changes
3. Our financial accounts
4. Our historical metrics by programme
5. List of all content releases
6. Plan changes added to our site from 2023 to mid-2025
   a. Allan Saldanha
   b. Elika Somani
   c. Ethan Perez
   d. Katie Hearsum
   e. Neel Nanda
   f. Rashida Polk
7. Blog posts covering major announcements
   a. 80,000 Hours has been putting much more resources into growing our audience
   b. How 80,000 Hours has changed some of our advice after the collapse of FTX
   c. Announcing the new 80,000 Hours career guide
   d. Announcing Niel Bowerman as the next CEO of 80,000 Hours
   e. We’re shifting our strategic approach to focus more on AGI
   f. 80,000 Hours completes spin-out from Effective Ventures
   g. The AI 2027 scenario and what it means: a video tour
8. About pages
   a. About 80,000 Hours
   b. Donate to 80,000 Hours
   c. Our donors