Why AGI could be here soon and what you can do about it: a primer

I’m writing a new guide to careers to help artificial general intelligence (AGI) go well. Here’s a summary of the bottom lines that’ll be in the guide as it stands. Stay tuned to hear our full reasoning and updates as our views evolve.

In short:

  • The chance of an AGI-driven technological explosion before 2030 — creating one of the most pivotal periods in history — is high enough to act on.
  • Since this transition poses major risks, and relatively few people are focused on navigating them, if you might be able to do something that helps, that’s likely the highest-impact thing you can do.
  • There are now many organisations with hundreds of jobs that could concretely help (many of which are non technical).
  • If you already have some experience (e.g. age 25+), typically the best path is to spend 20–200 hours reading about AI and meeting people in the field, then applying to jobs at organisations you’re aligned with — this both sets you up to have an impact relatively soon and advance in the field. If you can’t get a job right away, figure out the minimum additional skills, connections, and credentials you’d need, then get those.
  • If you’re at the start of your career (or need to reskill), you might be able to get an entry-level job or start a fellowship right away in order to learn rapidly. Otherwise, spend 1–3 years building whichever skill set listed below is the best fit for you.

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#213 – Will MacAskill on AI causing a “century in a decade” — and how we’re completely unprepared

Will MacAskill on AI causing a “century in a decade” — and how we’re completely unprepared

The 20th century saw unprecedented change: nuclear weapons, satellites, the rise and fall of communism, third-wave feminism, the internet, postmodernism, game theory, genetic engineering, the Big Bang theory, quantum mechanics, birth control, and more. Now imagine all of it compressed into just 10 years.

That’s the future Will MacAskill — philosopher, founding figure of effective altruism, and now researcher at the Forethought Centre for AI Strategy — argues we need to prepare for in his new paper “Preparing for the intelligence explosion.” Not in the distant future, but probably in three to seven years.

The reason: AI systems are rapidly approaching human-level capability in scientific research and intellectual tasks. Once AI exceeds human abilities in AI research itself, we’ll enter a recursive self-improvement cycle — creating wildly more capable systems. Soon after, by improving algorithms and manufacturing chips, we’ll deploy millions, then billions, then trillions of superhuman AI scientists working 24/7 without human limitations. These systems will collaborate across disciplines, build on each discovery instantly, and conduct experiments at unprecedented scale and speed — compressing a century of scientific progress into mere years.

Will compares the resulting situation to a mediaeval king suddenly needing to upgrade from bows and arrows to nuclear weapons to deal with an ideological threat from a country he’s never heard of, while simultaneously grappling with learning that he descended from monkeys and his god doesn’t exist.

What makes this acceleration perilous is that while technology can speed up almost arbitrarily, human institutions and decision-making are much more fixed.

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Emergency pod: Judge plants a legal time bomb under OpenAI (with Rose Chan Loui)

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 tens of billions in investment.

As nonprofit legal expert Rose Chan Loui explains, the court order set up multiple pathways for OpenAI’s conversion to be challenged. Though Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers denied Musk’s request to block the conversion before a trial, she expedited proceedings to the fall so the case could be heard before it’s likely to go ahead. (See Rob’s brief summary of developments in the case.)

And if Musk’s donations to OpenAI are enough to give him the right to bring a case, Rogers sounded very sympathetic to his objections to the OpenAI foundation selling the company, benefiting the founders who forswore “any intent to use OpenAI as a vehicle to enrich themselves.”

But that’s just one of multiple threats. The attorneys general (AGs) in California and Delaware both have standing to object to the conversion on the grounds that it is contrary to the foundation’s charitable purpose and therefore wrongs the public — which was promised all the charitable assets would be used to develop AI that benefits all of humanity, not to win a commercial race. Some, including Rose, suspect the court order was written as a signal to those AGs to take action.

And, as she explains, if the AGs remain silent, the court itself, seeing that the public interest isn’t being represented, could appoint a “special interest party” to take on the case in their place.

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Ask a career advisor: how to compete with AI models in the job market and whether to stay in the US government

This week, we answer more of our newsletter subscriber’s career questions!
I’ll tackle:

Laura: This is a difficult question, but I think it’s important to ask. I certainly don’t have all the answers, because the future is uncertain — perhaps especially now.

That said, I do think there are sensible steps to take to navigate the trajectory of AI and its global impact

First, let’s address the immediate concern about the job market. While AI is already changing the landscape of work, entry-level jobs haven’t disappeared. The 80,000 Hours job board has hundreds of entry-level openings, and other job sites will have many more. I expect there will still be plenty of jobs available when you graduate, even as AI continues to advance quickly.

As technology becomes better at the tasks that human workers perform, there are typically significant delays before it is widely adopted. Still, the economy will likely change as AI gets more powerful, and that may start happening in just a few years. So, my advice is to stay ahead of the adoption curve. Master prompting and evaluation techniques to ensure the quality of outputs. Learn to set up AI task automation systems.

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Expression of interest: writer/researcher

80,000 Hours’ mission and impact

80,000 Hours’ mission is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems.

We currently focus on explaining why and how our audience can help society safely navigate a transition to a world with transformative AI.

With more writers, we can help more people find careers aimed at making AGI go well, and have a big positive impact in those roles. For example, you might write an article on what it takes to be a successful nonprofit founder, or on the pros and cons of trying to work on AI safety from within an AI company. We think these pieces could help people make better decisions about their careers, but we don’t yet have the capacity to create them.

Over four million people visit our website each year, and thousands of people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. Surveys conducted by Coefficient Giving show that 80,000 Hours is the biggest driver of talent moving into work related to reducing global catastrophic risks. And thanks to its wide reach, the web programme is among our most cost-effective programmes.

The role

We’re looking for people who could excel in either or both of two overlapping profiles:

  • Combining strong writing skills with research, with a greater focus on investigating more complex topics and articles.
  • Managing other writers or other team members alongside the normal duties of a writer/researcher (or growing into a management position over the first year or so,

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Ask a career advisor: how mid-career people can help with AI and how to survive a job hunt

This week, we’re answering our newsletter subscribers’ career questions.

Question one: I’ve been working over 20 years as a software engineer, and participated in a few publications as a research engineer. I’m open to getting deeper into research, in fact I’m starting a PhD in computer science. I’m close to 50, but most of the career advice I see from 80,000 Hours seems focused on younger folk.

I’m wondering about reorienting towards global issues; does it make sense to continue with my current PhD? Drop it for one directly related to (e.g.) AI? Drop the PhD and just apply as a research engineer to appropriate companies with such engineers? Or just leave it to the next generation?

Sudhanshu: I would pretty much never say “leave it to others” — there might not be many others, and experienced folks like you often have a lot to offer. We are always hearing from impactful organisations all the time who want experienced, mid-career people to join them in key roles.

With 20 years as a software engineer, I’d be excited if you could apply that experience directly to a pressing world problem, unless you’ve gotten some evidence to suggest that you need some new skills. I think it makes sense to try your hand at just working directly on the problem you think is most important before moving on to other options.

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#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 capability becomes available, societies that adopt it tend to outcompete those that don’t. Those who resist too much can find themselves taken over or rendered irrelevant.

This dynamic played out dramatically in 1853 when US Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay with steam-powered warships that seemed magical to the Japanese, who had spent centuries deliberately limiting their technological development. With far greater military power, the US was able to force Japan to open itself to trade. Within 15 years, Japan had undergone the Meiji Restoration and transformed itself in a desperate scramble to catch up.

Today we see hints of similar pressure around artificial intelligence. Even companies, countries, and researchers deeply concerned about where AI could take us feel compelled to push ahead — worried that if they don’t, less careful actors will develop transformative AI capabilities at around the same time anyway.

But Allan argues this technological determinism isn’t absolute. While broad patterns may be inevitable, history shows we do have some ability to steer how technologies are developed, by who, and what they’re used for first.

As part of that approach, Allan has been promoting efforts to make AI more capable of sophisticated cooperation, and improving the tests Google uses to measure how well its models could do things like mislead people, hack and take control of their own servers, or spread autonomously in the wild.

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Emergency pod: Elon tries to crash OpenAI’s party (with Rose Chan Loui)

On Monday, February 10, Elon 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 structure — a nonprofit foundation controlling a for-profit corporation — turns the gambit into an audacious attack on the plan OpenAI announced in December to free itself from nonprofit oversight.

As today’s guest Rose Chan Loui — founding executive director of UCLA Law’s Lowell Milken Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofits — explains, OpenAI’s nonprofit board now faces a challenging choice.

The nonprofit has a legal duty to pursue its charitable mission of ensuring that AI benefits all of humanity to the best of its ability. And if Musk’s bid would better accomplish that mission than the for-profit’s proposal — that the nonprofit give up control of the company and change its charitable purpose to the vague and barely related “pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as health care, education, and science” — then it’s not clear the California or Delaware Attorneys General will, or should, approve the deal.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly tweeted “no thank you” — but that was probably a legal slipup, as he’s not meant to be involved in such a decision, which has to be made by the nonprofit board ‘at arm’s length’ from the for-profit company Sam himself runs.

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AGI disagreements and misconceptions: Rob, Luisa, & past guests hash it out

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 addressing those and other questions, intermixed with opinions from hosts Luisa Rodriguez and Rob Wiblin recorded back in 2023.

You can decide whether the views we expressed (and those from guests) then have held up these last two busy years. You’ll hear:

  • Ajeya Cotra on overrated AGI worries
  • Holden Karnofsky on the dangers of aligned AI, why unaligned AI might not kill us, and the power that comes from just making models bigger
  • Ian Morris on why the future must be radically different from the present
  • Nick Joseph on whether his company’s internal safety policies are enough
  • Richard Ngo on what everyone gets wrong about how ML models work
  • Tom Davidson on why he believes crazy-sounding explosive growth stories… and Michael Webb on why he doesn’t
  • Carl Shulman on why you’ll prefer robot nannies over human ones
  • Zvi Mowshowitz on why he’s against working at AI companies except in some safety roles
  • Hugo Mercier on why even superhuman AGI won’t be that persuasive
  • Rob Long on the case for and against digital sentience
  • Anil Seth on why he thinks consciousness is probably biological
  • Lewis Bollard on whether AI advances will help or hurt nonhuman animals
  • Rohin Shah on whether humanity’s work ends at the point it creates AGI

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How quickly could robots scale up?

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

Today robots barely have the dexterity of a toddler, but are rapidly improving.

If their algorithms and hardware advance enough to handle many physical human jobs, how quickly could they become a major part of the workforce?

Here’s some order of magnitude estimates showing it could happen pretty fast.

Robot cost of production

Today’s humanoid robots cost about $100,000, with perhaps 10,000 units produced annually. But manufacturing costs tend to plummet with scale:

For solar energy, every doubling of production was associated with a 20% decline in costs. In other industries, we see estimates ranging from 5-40%, so 20% seems a reasonable middle point.

Solar power cost over time

That means a 1000x increase in production (10 doublings), should decrease costs 10x to $10,000/unit. That’s around the cost of manufacturing a car.

However, humanoid robots only use about 10% the materials of a car, so it’s plausible they could eventually become another 10x cheaper, or $1000 each.

Though, it’s also possible the elements for fine motor control remain far more difficult to manufacture. Let’s add 2x to account for that.

Robot operating costs

If a robot costs $10,000 and lasts for three years working 24/7, the hardware costs $0.40 per hour.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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