New releases

It looks like there are some good funding opportunities in AI safety right now

Blog post by · Published January 10th, 2025

This post was written by Benjamin Todd in his personal capacity and originally posted on benjamintodd.substack.com.

The AI safety community has grown rapidly since the ChatGPT wake-up call, but available funding doesn’t seem to have kept pace.

However, there’s a more recent dynamic that’s created even better funding opportunities, which I witnessed as a recommender in the most recent Survival and Flourishing Fund grant round.

Most philanthropic (vs. government or industry) AI safety funding (50%) comes from one source: Good Ventures, via Open Philanthropy. But they’ve recently stopped funding several categories of work (my own categories, not theirs):

In addition, they are currently not funding (or not fully funding):

  • Many non-US think tanks, who don’t want to appear influenced by an American organisation (there’s now probably more than 20 of these)
  • They do fund technical safety non-profits like FAR AI, though they’re probably underfunding this area, in part due to difficulty hiring for this area the last few years (though they’ve hired recently)
  • Political campaigns,

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What happened with AI in 2024?

Blog post by · Published January 3rd, 2025

The idea this week: despite claims of stagnation, AI research still advanced rapidly in 2024.

Some people say AI research has plateaued. But a lot of evidence from the last year points in the opposite direction:

  • New capabilities were developed and emerged
  • Research indicates existing AI can accelerate science

And at the same time, important findings about AI safety and risk came out (see below).

AI advances might still stall. Some leaders in the field have warned that a lack of good data, for example, may impede further capability growth, though others disagree. Regardless, growth clearly hasn’t stopped yet.

Meanwhile, the aggregate forecast on Metaculus of when we’ll see the first “general” AI system — which would be highly capable across a wide range of tasks — is 2031.

All of this matters a lot, because AI poses potentially existential risks. We think making sure AI goes well is a top pressing world problem.

If AI advances fast, this work is not only important but urgent.

Here are some of the key developments in AI from the last year:

New AI models and capabilities

OpenAI announced in late December that its new model o3 achieved a large leap forward in capabilities.

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2024 highlightapalooza — the best of The 80,000 Hours Podcast this year

Podcast by · Published December 27th, 2024

It’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode, including:

  • How to use the microphone on someone’s mobile phone to figure out what password they’re typing into their laptop
  • Why mercilessly driving the New World screwworm to extinction could be the most compassionate thing humanity has ever done
  • Why evolutionary psychology doesn’t support a cynical view of human nature but actually explains why so many of us are intensely sensitive to the harms we cause to others
  • How superforecasters and domain experts seem to disagree so much about AI risk, but when you zoom in it’s mostly a disagreement about timing
  • Why the sceptics are wrong and you will want to use robot nannies to take care of your kids — and also why despite having big worries about the development of AGI, Carl Shulman is strongly against efforts to pause AI research today
  • How much of the gender pay gap is due to direct pay discrimination vs other factors
  • How cleaner wrasse fish blow the mirror test out of the water
  • Why effective altruism may be too big a tent to work well
  • How we could best motivate pharma companies to test existing drugs to see if they help cure other diseases — something they currently have no reason to bother with

…as well as 27 other top observations and arguments from the past year of the show.

Remember that all of these clips come from the 20-minute highlight reels we make for every episode, which are released on our sister feed, 80k After Hours. So if you’re struggling to keep up with our regularly scheduled entertainment, you can still get the best parts of our conversations there.

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2024 in review: some of our top pieces from this year

Blog post by · Published December 20th, 2024

This week, we’re looking back at some of our top content from the year!

Here are some of our favourite and most important articles, posts, and podcast episodes we published in 2024:

Articles

Factory farming — There’s a clear candidate for the biggest moral mistake that humanity is currently making: factory farming. We raise and slaughter 1.6-4.5 trillion animals a year on factory farms, causing tremendous amounts of suffering.

The moral status of digital minds — Understanding whether AI systems might suffer, be sentient, or otherwise matter morally is potentially one of the most pressing problems in the world.

Should you work at a frontier AI company? — Working at a frontier AI company is plausibly some people’s highest-impact option, but some roles could be extremely harmful. So it’s critical to be discerning when considering this option — and particularly open to changing course. We’ve previously written about this topic, but explored it in more depth this year while taking account of recent developments, such as prominent departures at OpenAI.

Risks of stable totalitarianism — Some of the worst atrocities have been committed by totalitarian rulers. In the future, the threat posed by these regimes could be even greater.

Nuclear weapons safety and security — Nuclear weapons continue to pose an existential threat to humanity,

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#211 – Sam Bowman on why housing still isn’t fixed and what would actually work

Podcast by · Published December 19th, 2024

Rich countries seem to find it harder and harder to do anything that creates some losers. People who don’t want houses, offices, power stations, trains, subway stations (or whatever) built in their area can usually find some way to block them, even if the benefits to society outweigh the costs 10 or 100 times over.

The result of this ‘vetocracy’ has been skyrocketing rent in major cities — not to mention exacerbating homelessness, energy poverty, and a host of other social maladies. This has been known for years but precious little progress has been made. When trains, tunnels, or nuclear reactors are occasionally built, they’re comically expensive and slow compared to 50 years ago. And housing construction in the UK and California has barely increased, remaining stuck at less than half what it was in the ’60s and ’70s.

Today’s guest — economist and editor of Works in Progress Sam Bowman — isn’t content to just condemn the Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) mentality behind this stagnation. He wants to actually get a tonne of stuff built, and by that standard the strategy of attacking ‘NIMBYs’ has been an abject failure. They are too politically powerful, and if you try to crush them, sooner or later they crush you.

So, as Sam explains, a different strategy is needed, one that acknowledges that opponents of development are often correct that a given project will make them worse off. But the thing is, in the cases we care about, these modest downsides are outweighed by the enormous benefits to others — who will finally have a place to live, be able to get to work, and have the energy to heat their home.

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Two key tips for giving season

Blog post by · Published December 6th, 2024

It’s giving season! Cue excitement…or dread?

If you’re anything like me, December is a busy time. You’re wrapping up projects, reviewing the past year’s work, planning for holidays, and buying gifts. (Not to mention, drafting a newsletter!)

So “giving season” — the time of year when most charitable donations are made — may just feel like one more thing to do. But donating is one of the most important decisions you can make.

Consider that:

Of course, the high stakes of giving can make it feel even worse to rush it, and even more daunting.

I’ve definitely struggled to live up to my ideals when faced with this. I can confirm that New Year’s Eve is not when you want to deal with details like finding a quick online payment method. And I used to be the executive director of Giving What We Can and a grantmaker for the EA Infrastructure Fund — so if you also struggle with this, you’re not alone!

My bottom line advice is: find ways to make fewer decisions. They’re stressful and time consuming.

Below are two key tips that work for me and make my giving season slightly less hectic.

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#210 – Cameron Meyer Shorb on dismantling the myth that we can’t do anything to help wild animals

Podcast by , and · Published November 29th, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Cameron Meyer Shorb — executive director of the Wild Animal Initiative — about the cutting-edge research on wild animal welfare.

They cover:

  • How it’s almost impossible to comprehend the sheer number of wild animals on Earth — and why that makes their potential suffering so important to consider.
  • How bad experiences like disease, parasites, and predation truly are for wild animals — and how we would even begin to study that empirically.
  • The tricky ethical dilemmas in trying to help wild animals without unintended consequences for ecosystems or other potentially sentient beings.
  • Potentially promising interventions to help wild animals — like selective reforestation, vaccines, fire management, and gene drives.
  • Why Cameron thinks the best approach to improving wild animal welfare is to first build a dedicated research field — and how Wild Animal Initiative’s activities support this.
  • The many career paths in science, policy, and technology that could contribute to improving wild animal welfare.
  • And much more.

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#209 – Rose Chan Loui on OpenAI’s gambit to ditch its nonprofit

Podcast by and · Published November 27th, 2024

One OpenAI critic describes it as “the theft of at least the millennium and quite possibly all of human history.” Are they right?

Back in 2015 OpenAI was but a humble nonprofit. That nonprofit started a for-profit, OpenAI LLC, but made sure to retain ownership and control. But that for-profit, having become a tech giant with vast staffing and investment, has grown tired of its shackles and wants to change the deal.

Facing off against it stand eight out-gunned and out-numbered part-time volunteers. Can they hope to defend the nonprofit’s interests against the overwhelming profit motives arrayed against them?

That’s the question host Rob Wiblin puts to nonprofit legal expert Rose Chan Loui of UCLA, who concludes that with a “heroic effort” and a little help from some friendly state attorneys general, they might just stand a chance.

As Rose lays out, on paper OpenAI is controlled by a nonprofit board that:

  • Can fire the CEO.
  • Would receive all the profits after the point OpenAI makes 100x returns on investment.
  • Is legally bound to do whatever it can to pursue its charitable purpose: “to build artificial general intelligence that benefits humanity.”

But that control is a problem for OpenAI the for-profit and its CEO Sam Altman — all the more so after the board concluded back in November 2023 that it couldn’t trust Altman and attempted to fire him (although those board members were ultimately ousted themselves after failing to adequately explain their rationale).

Nonprofit control makes it harder to attract investors, who don’t want a board stepping in just because they think what the company is doing is bad for humanity. And OpenAI the business is thirsty for as many investors as possible, because it wants to beat competitors and train the first truly general AI — able to do every job humans currently do — which is expected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

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#208 – Elizabeth Cox on the case that TV shows, movies, and novels can improve the world

Podcast by · Published November 21st, 2024

In today’s episode, Keiran Harris speaks with Elizabeth Cox — founder of the independent production company Should We Studio — about the case that storytelling can improve the world.

They cover:

  • How TV shows and movies compare to novels, short stories, and creative nonfiction if you’re trying to do good.
  • The existing empirical evidence for the impact of storytelling.
  • Their competing takes on the merits of thinking carefully about target audiences.
  • Whether stories can really change minds on deeply entrenched issues, or whether writers need to have more modest goals.
  • Whether humans will stay relevant as creative writers with the rise of powerful AI models.
  • Whether you can do more good with an overtly educational show vs other approaches.
  • Elizabeth’s experience with making her new five-part animated show Ada — including why she chose the topics of civilisational collapse, kidney donations, artificial wombs, AI, and gene drives.
  • The pros and cons of animation as a medium.
  • Career advice for creative writers.
  • Keiran’s idea for a longtermist Christmas movie.
  • And plenty more.

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#207 – Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on why she shut down her charity, and why more founders should follow her lead

Podcast by and · Published November 14th, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Sarah Eustis-Guthrie — cofounder of the now-shut-down Maternal Health Initiative, a postpartum family planning nonprofit in Ghana — about her experience starting and running MHI, and ultimately making the difficult decision to shut down when the programme wasn’t as impactful as they expected.

They cover:

  • The evidence that made Sarah and her cofounder Ben think their organisation could be super impactful for women — both from a health perspective and an autonomy and wellbeing perspective.
  • Early yellow and red flags that maybe they didn’t have the full story about the effectiveness of the intervention.
  • All the steps Sarah and Ben took to build the organisation — and where things went wrong in retrospect.
  • Dealing with the emotional side of putting so much time and effort into a project that ultimately failed.
  • Why it’s so important to talk openly about things that don’t work out, and Sarah’s key lessons learned from the experience.
  • The misaligned incentives that discourage charities from shutting down ineffective programmes.
  • The movement of trust-based philanthropy, and Sarah’s ideas to further improve how global development charities get their funding and prioritise their beneficiaries over their operations.
  • The pros and cons of exploring and pivoting in careers.
  • What it’s like to participate in the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program, and how listeners can assess if they might be a good fit.
  • And plenty more.

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Parenting insights from Rob and 8 past guests

Podcast by , , and · Published November 8th, 2024

With kids very much on the team’s mind we thought it would be fun to review some comments about parenting featured on the show over the years, then have hosts Luisa Rodriguez and Rob Wiblin react to them.

After hearing 8 former guests’ insights, Luisa and Rob chat about:

  • Which of these resonate the most with Rob, now that he’s been a dad for six months (plus an update at nine months).
  • What have been the biggest surprises for Rob in becoming a parent.
  • Whether the benefits of parenthood can actually be studied, and if we get skewed impressions of how bad parenting is.
  • How Rob’s dealt with work and parenting tradeoffs, and his advice for other would-be parents.
  • Rob’s list of recommended purchases for new or upcoming parents

This bonus episode includes excerpts from:

  • Ezra Klein on parenting yourself as well as your children (from episode #157)
  • Holden Karnofsky on freezing embryos and being surprised by how fun it is to have a kid (#110 and #158)
  • Parenting expert Emily Oster on how having kids affect relationships, careers and kids, and what actually makes a difference in young kids’ lives (#178)
  • Russ Roberts on empirical research when deciding whether to have kids (#87)
  • Spencer Greenberg on his surveys of parents (#183)
  • Elie Hassenfeld on how having children reframes his relationship to solving pressing global problems (#153)
  • Bryan Caplan on homeschooling (#172)
  • Nita Farahany on thinking about life and the world differently with kids (#174)

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Why we get burned out — and what helps

Blog post by · Published November 8th, 2024

The idea this week: there are no magical fixes for career burnout, but there are concrete steps that can help.

When I was in the last years of my PhD studying representations of science and technology in fiction, I started feeling tired every day. I was checked out from my research, and I had a nagging sense that I wasn’t as good at it as I used to be.

I now realise I was experiencing burnout — and these feelings are quite common.

The World Health Organisation will tell you that burnout is an occupational syndrome that results from chronic workplace stress. It’s characterised by energy depletion, increased negativity and cynicism about your job, and reduced efficacy.

In my case, I was struggling with a mismatch between my work and what I thought really mattered. I was doing a PhD to become a literature professor, but my research seemed fundamentally disconnected from what I cared about: helping with pressing world problems.

Once something feels pointless, it’s very difficult to muster the motivation to get it done.

The silver lining is that now I can use this experience to help others in my role as a career advisor. And here is one piece of advice I often give: if you can, try to find work that aligns with what you think matters. In order to do this, it’s important to first reflect on what problems you care about and how to best tackle them.

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#206 – Anil Seth on the predictive brain and how to study consciousness

Podcast by and · Published November 1st, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Anil Seth — director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science — about how much we can learn about consciousness by studying the brain.

They cover:

  • What groundbreaking studies with split-brain patients and blindsight have already taught us about the nature of consciousness.
  • Anil’s theory that our perception is a “controlled hallucination” generated by our predictive brains.
  • Whether looking for the parts of the brain that correlate with consciousness is the right way to learn about what consciousness is.
  • Whether our theories of human consciousness can be applied to nonhuman animals.
  • Anil’s thoughts on whether machines could ever be conscious.
  • Disagreements and open questions in the field of consciousness studies, and what areas Anil is most excited to explore next.
  • And much more.

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Stable totalitarianism

Problem profile by · Last updated October 2024 · First published June 2024

Working on this problem may be very important for improving the long-term future of humanity. However, it’s probably somewhat less of a priority than our highest priority problems because the path to stable totalitarianism involves multiple unlikely steps.

Still, there are some promising career options in this area you might want to consider, particularly if you think stable totalitarianism is more likely than we do, or if you’re particularly well-placed to work on it.

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What are experts in biosecurity worried about?

Blog post by · Published October 25th, 2024

The idea this week: biosecurity experts disagree on many of the field’s most important questions.

We spoke to more than a dozen biosecurity experts to understand the space better. We let them give their answers anonymously so that they could feel comfortable speaking their minds.

We don’t agree with everything the experts told us — they don’t even agree with one another! But we think it can be really useful for people who want to learn about or enter this field to understand the ongoing debates and disagreements.

We already published the first article on their answers about misconceptions in biosecurity, and we’re now sharing three more editions, completing this four-part series:

1. AI’s impact on biosecurity

We think one of the world’s most pressing problems is the risk of catastrophic pandemics, and powerful AI could make this risk higher than ever before.

Experts generally agreed that AI developments pose new risks, but there was some disagreement on how big and immediate the threat is.

These are some key quotes from the experts on areas of disagreement:

  • “AI may really accelerate biorisk. Unfortunately, I don’t think we have yet figured out great tools to manage that risk.” (Read more)
  • “My hot take is that AI is obviously a big deal, but I’m not sure it’s actually as big a deal in biosecurity as it might be for other areas.”

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#205 – Sébastien Moro on the most insane things fish can do

Podcast by and · Published October 23rd, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to science writer and video blogger Sébastien Moro about the latest research on fish consciousness, intelligence, and potential sentience.

They cover:

  • The insane capabilities of fish in tests of memory, learning, and problem-solving.
  • Examples of fish that can beat primates on cognitive tests and recognise individual human faces.
  • Fishes’ social lives, including pair bonding, “personalities,” cooperation, and cultural transmission.
  • Whether fish can experience emotions, and how this is even studied.
  • The wild evolutionary innovations of fish, who adapted to thrive in diverse environments from mangroves to the deep sea.
  • How some fish have sensory capabilities we can’t even really fathom — like “seeing” electrical fields and colours we can’t perceive.
  • Ethical issues raised by evidence that fish may be conscious and experience suffering.
  • And plenty more.

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#204 – Nate Silver on making sense of SBF, and his biggest critiques of effective altruism

Podcast by and · Published October 16th, 2024

In today’s episode, Rob Wiblin speaks with FiveThirtyEight election forecaster and author Nate Silver about his new book: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.

On the Edge explores a cultural grouping Nate dubs “the River” — made up of people who are analytical, competitive, quantitatively minded, risk-taking, and willing to be contrarian. It’s a tendency he considers himself a part of, and the River has been doing well for itself in recent decades — gaining cultural influence through success in finance, technology, gambling, philanthropy, and politics, among other pursuits.

But on Nate’s telling, it’s a group particularly vulnerable to oversimplification and hubris. Where Riverians’ ability to calculate the “expected value” of actions isn’t as good as they believe, their poorly calculated bets can leave a trail of destruction — aptly demonstrated by Nate’s discussion of the extended time he spent with FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried before and after his downfall.

Given this show’s focus on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them, we narrow in on Nate’s discussion of effective altruism (EA), which has been little covered elsewhere. Nate met many leaders and members of the EA community in researching the book and has watched its evolution online for many years.

Effective altruism is the River style of doing good, because of its willingness to buck both fashion and common sense — making its giving decisions based on mathematical calculations and analytical arguments with the goal of maximising an outcome.

Nate sees a lot to admire in this, but the book paints a mixed picture in which effective altruism is arguably too trusting, too utilitarian, too selfless, and too reckless at some times, while too image-conscious at others.

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Anonymous answers: could advances in AI supercharge biorisk?

Article by and · Published October 2024

This is Part Four of our four-part series of biosecurity anonymous answers. You can also read Part One: Misconceptions, Part Two: Fighting pandemics, and Part Three: Infohazards.

One of the most prominently discussed catastrophic risks from AI is the potential for an AI-enabled bioweapon.

But discussions of future technologies are necessarily speculative. So it’s not surprising that there’s no consensus among biosecurity experts about the impact AI is likely to have on their field.

We decided to talk to more than a dozen biosecurity experts to better understand their views on the potential for AI to exacerbate biorisk. This is the fourth and final instalment of our biosecurity anonymous answers series. Below, we present 11 answers from these experts about whether recent advances in AI — such as ChatGPT and AlphaFold — have changed their biosecurity priorities and what interventions they think are promising to reduce the risks. (As we conducted the interviews around one year ago, some experts may have updated their views in the meantime.)

Some key topics and areas of disagreement that emerged include:

  • The extent to which recent AI developments have changed biosecurity priorities
  • The potential of AI to lower barriers for creating biological threats
  • The effectiveness of current AI models in the biological domain
  • The balance between AI as a threat multiplier and as a tool for defence
  • The urgency of developing new interventions to address AI-enhanced biosecurity risks
  • The role of AI companies and policymakers in mitigating potential dangers

Here’s what the experts had to say.

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Updates to our problem rankings of factory farming, climate change, and more

Blog post by · Published October 8th, 2024

At 80,000 Hours, we are interested in the question: “if you want to find the best way to have a positive impact with your career, what should you do on the margin?” The ‘on the margin’ qualifier is crucial. We are asking how you can have a bigger impact, given how the rest of society spends its resources.

To help our readers think this through, we publish a list of what we see as the world’s most pressing problems. We rank the top most issues by our assessment of where additional work and resources will have the greatest positive impact, considered impartially and in expectation.

Every problem on our list is there because we think it’s very important and a big opportunity for doing good. We’re excited for our readers to make progress on all of them, and think all of them would ideally get more resources and attention than they currently do from society at large.

The most pressing problems are those that have the greatest combination of being:

  • Large in scale: solving the issue improves more lives to a larger extent over the long run.
  • Neglected by others: the best interventions aren’t already being done.
  • Tractable: we can make progress if we try.

We’ve recently updated our list.

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#203 – Peter Godfrey-Smith on interfering with wild nature, accepting death, and the origin of complex civilisation

Podcast by and · Published October 3rd, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Peter Godfrey-Smith — bestselling author and science philosopher — about his new book, Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World.

They cover:

  • Why octopuses and dolphins haven’t developed complex civilisation despite their intelligence.
  • How the role of culture has been crucial in enabling human technological progress.
  • Why Peter thinks the evolutionary transition from sea to land was key to enabling human-like intelligence — and why we should expect to see that in extraterrestrial life too.
  • Whether Peter thinks wild animals’ lives are, on balance, good or bad, and when, if ever, we should intervene in their lives.
  • Whether we can and should avoid death by uploading human minds.
  • And plenty more.

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