New releases

#249 – Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world

Podcast by · Published July 28th, 2026

If you genuinely believe that humanity could be wiped out by AI or a pandemic, what is the appropriate amount of fear to feel?

“As much as possible” can seem like the only reasonable answer. If the world is on fire, surely feeling calm just means you haven’t internalised the situation. When you’re trying to prevent human extinction or end factory farming, taking a weekend off can feel morally indefensible.

But fear is an alarm designed to provoke short bursts of drastic action, not a state humans can productively inhabit for months or years. Guilt turns out not to be such a great engine for productivity, either. So what is the best way to sustain motivation to work on the world’s most pressing problems in the long term?

Host Luisa Rodriguez and guest Spencer Greenberg tackle this question from many angles — talking to therapists, running a survey of people working on existential risks, and pulling relevant lessons from Spencer’s new book, The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life. Drawing on all these sources, they put together a plan for how to make an impact without grinding yourself to a pulp.

This episode was recorded on June 12 and 15, 2026.

Our production team includes:

  • Video editors: Josh Alward, Dominic Armstrong, Ollie Bignell, Andrés Escobar, Jasper Luithlen, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
  • Producers: Elizabeth Cox and Nick Stockton
  • Coordination and support: Katy Moore and Lou Moran
  • Music: CORBIT

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#248 – Jasmine Sun on what the people building AI really believe

Podcast by · Published July 21st, 2026

Many AI researchers believe mass job displacement is coming — and some even think there’s a chance their technology will kill everyone. But they’re building it anyway. Writer and journalist Jasmine Sun has been documenting why from the inside.

Jasmine describes her work as an “anthropology of disruption.” She’s embedded herself in Silicon Valley’s AI subcultures — attending the parties and conferences, conducting off-the-record interviews — to understand the beliefs of the small group of people shaping this technology.

Some of her findings are unsettling. Asked what advice they’d give a normal 17-year-old, almost every AI researcher said the same thing: “I have no idea… It’s a really scary time. I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of jobs for them left.”

Their motives for building advanced AI are varied: a mix of optimism for humanity, techno-determinism, and a desire to secure their own future in the face of a possible “permanent underclass.” A few go even further, actually hoping for a world where machines — rather than humans — are running the show.

When the room can’t even agree on whether humans should stay in control, building a consensus on how to build AI safely gets much harder.

Beyond Silicon Valley, Jasmine’s also tracking the rise of “AI populists,” who see AI as the latest example of corporate elites concentrating their power at the expense of everyone else. In the US, populist sentiment about AI has mostly manifested in protests and votes against data centres. But sometimes, it has escalated into violence: a molotov cocktail thrown at Sam Altman’s house, and open fire on the home of a politician who’d backed a data centre. Jasmine thinks public anger will keep finding an outlet, one way or another, until people feel like they’ll actually share in AI’s gains.

In this interview with host Zershaaneh Qureshi, Jasmine Sun takes us inside the multifarious factions on AI’s bleeding edge. They also discuss:

  • How “doomer” became the lowest-status label in Silicon Valley, and what that means for AI safety
  • Why the AI industry’s PR strategy has failed, and what it would take to rebuild public trust
  • What’s under the surface of the Chinese public’s much more positive response to AI
  • Jasmine’s reasons to be cautiously hopeful: it’s an unusually high-leverage time to work on AI safety, with policymakers and philanthropists hungry for good ideas

This episode was recorded on June 4, 2026.

Want to get up to speed on AI?

We’ve got a crash course of 10 of our podcast episodes designed to help you get to grips with transformative AI — particularly if you’re new to the topic — and what you can do to help shape its trajectory.

Our production team includes:

  • Video editors: Josh Alward, Dominic Armstrong, Jasper Luithlen, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, Simon Monsour, and Andrés Escobar
  • Producers: Elizabeth Cox and Nick Stockton
  • Coordination and support: Katy Moore and Lou Moran
  • Music: CORBIT

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Why we’re increasing the AI focus of our job board

Blog post by · Published July 17th, 2026

In light of AI progress this year, we have decided to stop posting senior-level and mid-career global health, animal welfare, and climate change roles on the 80,000 Hours job board. We will continue to post entry-level and junior roles, and we will link to other job boards that focus on these areas.

Why we’re no longer posting mid- and senior-level roles in these areas

AI progress this year (Claude Opus 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7, GPT-5.3-Codex, and Claude Mythos, all of which represented faster capability growth than I expected) has convinced me that the expected impact of work on transformative AI (TAI) has grown dramatically, relative to that of work on global health, animal welfare, or climate change (henceforth: non-TAI), and that we are entering an all-hands-on-deck situation for TAI. For the time being, our mission is best served by focusing on AI and roles related to catastrophic AI-mediated risks (e.g. biosecurity or AIxAnimals). This is because:

  • We have short timelines to transformative AI: We think it’s quite plausible that transformative AI will arrive in the next 5 years. While I used to be less confident in this, the progress since Opus 4.5 has made me think it is quite likely that by 2040 we will have reached transformative AI.
  • Because we have so little time, transformative AI going well “by default” now seems relatively unlikely to me, which means there is a lot of work to be done.

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Scaling organisations making AI go well

Career review by · Published July 15th, 2026

In a nutshell: Many organisations working on making AI go well plan to grow rapidly in the coming years, driven by the urgency of the problems humanity faces and the significant increase in philanthropic funding available to solve them. These organisations often struggle to fill senior management and operations roles like chief operating officers, chiefs of staff, recruiting leads, and programme managers. If you have experience managing teams or complex projects, especially at a growing startup or nonprofit, you could lead and execute projects meant to bring about a better future.

Pros:

  • A great operator can multiply the output of an entire team.
  • Your expertise will be in high demand; few senior candidates combine the right career experience with deep AI safety knowledge and interest.
  • You can see the results of your actions and know you made a difference on projects.
  • The field is growing fast, so you can advance quickly if you perform well.

Cons:

  • Even with an impressive CV, you’ll likely need to develop AI safety knowledge and understand an organisation’s strategic priorities before you secure a role.
  • The talent pipelines for management and operations roles are less well-developed than those for paths like research or policy.
  • While these organisations are growing fast, many are still small. Senior hires may occasionally be required to take on administrative tasks.

Key facts on fit: If you have strategy and management experience in a fast-growing startup or nonprofit, or in consulting, finance, tech, or recruiting — and you have deep AI safety knowledge and motivation — you might be a great fit. To help scale an AI safety organisation you need to understand its goals, reason in a transparent and analytical way about how it can achieve them, and be open to others’ viewpoints on how to solve problems.

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#247 – Anton Leicht on how middle powers avoid losing everything in a post-AI world

Podcast by · Published July 14th, 2026

In a post-AGI world, can a country without access to frontier AI even be considered sovereign anymore?

Anton Leicht says once frontier AI becomes a core economic input, the countries that own it will pull further and further ahead. Everyone else stays a customer… or worse. Maybe the dominant power wants your land, or a military base, or a resource. Without economic leverage, there’s very little you could do about it.

Anton — Carnegie fellow and writer of the blog Threading the Needle — thinks middle powers should band together and build their own frontier models.

He’s costed it out: something like $500 billion over four years for a band of allied democracies. That’s not absurd money for the G7 minus the US. The problem is you’d be asking treasuries to take on sovereign debt for a speculative venture with no business case, wide open to US coercion and domestic backlash.

So despite its promise, Anton’s verdict is that it probably won’t happen. His backup is for countries to ask themselves: if intelligence becomes abundant, what stays scarce?

  • Upstream, that’s everything that feeds the supply chain: ASML’s lithography machines, chipmaking, exclusive training data — all of it gets more valuable as AI does.
  • Downstream, “a country of geniuses in a data centre” still can’t cure cancer without someone building the production plants and running the trials. The Europeans, Japanese, and South Koreans are good at exactly these real-world bottlenecks.

It’s an imperfect fix. The US would still hold more leverage, plus an incentive to re-industrialise and cut you out. The prize is avoiding the worst outcomes: a gradual but irreversible decline, waiting to be either annexed or discarded as the US and China race ahead.

In this episode, Anton and host Tom Reed look at what middle powers should start doing now to keep a seat at the table.

This episode was recorded on June 19, 2026.

Our production team includes:

  • Video editors: Josh Alward, Dominic Armstrong, Ollie Bignell, Andrés Escobar, Jasper Luithlen, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour.
  • Producers: Elizabeth Cox and Nick Stockton
  • Coordination and support: Katy Moore and Lou Moran
  • Camera operator: Jeremy Chevillotte
  • Music: CORBIT

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#246 – Sneha Revanur on how a small team of activists helped pass America’s landmark AI safety laws

Podcast by · Published July 8th, 2026

Six years ago, aged just 15, Sneha Revanur founded the AI advocacy nonprofit Encode — back when AI felt like a niche issue. Now the world’s caught up with her, and she’s ready to share everything she’s learned about the politics of AI.

Encode has grown from a grassroots youth organisation to spearheading an unlikely coalition of AI-exposed groups — family-first conservatives, grieving mothers, Hollywood actors, and AI safety researchers — with the strength to take on $125m-funded anti-regulation lobbyists.

So far, Encode’s strategy of taking many experimental swings has netted major victories (including California’s frontier AI safety bill, SB-53, and New York’s RAISE Act) as well as some disappointing setbacks.

Going up against Big Tech hasn’t been easy. In 2025, OpenAI subpoenaed Encode’s general counsel at his home, with a sheriff’s deputy arriving while he was having dinner with his wife. The fallout went viral, resulting in more attention than Encode had ever experienced — and Sneha was forced to decide how hard to push back against a company she’d need to negotiate with for years to come.

In today’s conversation, Zershaaneh Qureshi interrogates some of Encode’s strategic moves. The pair discuss all the above, plus:

  • How the AI industry’s crypto-inspired anti-regulation strategy is not “AGI-pilled”
  • Why AI advocacy doesn’t have to be held back by the slow pace of policy
  • How mutual trust can hold together the unlikeliest of political allies
  • Advice for aspiring AI advocates — including how to balance political persuasion with rigorous reasoning

Due to technical issues, this episode was recorded across two days (May 26 and 28, 2026) and spliced together.

Our production team includes:

  • Video editors: Josh Alward, Dominic Armstrong, Jasper Luithlen, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, Simon Monsour, and Andrés Escobar
  • Producer: Nick Stockton and Elizabeth Cox
  • Coordination and support: Katy Moore and Lou Moran
  • Music: CORBIT

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We can guess what intergalactic war would look like. And strangely, it matters.

Podcast by · Published June 18th, 2026

Intergalactic war is probably billions of years away — yet physics can already tell us how it ends. And strangely that conclusion is relevant to decisions people have to make today.

In this video, Rob Wiblin walks through a fascinating analysis from researcher Beren Millidge that uses known physics — no wormholes or faster-than-light travel — to identify the only three weapons that could work at an intergalactic scale.

We then unpack how to best defend against each.

The upshot is that at the intergalactic scale, violence is a losing proposition.

If so, the universe is most likely to settle into a stable patchwork where each galaxy belongs to whoever got to it first. Which would mean that what humanity does over the next few centuries could permanently decide which slice of the cosmos belongs to Earth-originating life — and whether our very existence turns out to be a good thing, or a bad one.

This episode was recorded on March 2, 2026.

Video editor: Nick Perlman
Producers: Elizabeth Cox and Nick Stockton
Coordination and support: Katy Moore and Lou Moran
Camera operator: Dominic Armstrong

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AI policy in the US government

Career review by · Published June 11th, 2026

In a nutshell: The US federal government is likely to be the most consequential regulator of AI in the world, with jurisdiction over the most prominent AI companies and the chip supply chain. Working in government could position you to support better policy ideas and — perhaps more importantly — help to ensure that those ideas are implemented effectively. At the same time, the path to influence is long and politically constrained, the culture isn’t for everyone, and the potential for impact comes with a risk of making things worse.

Pros:

  • Windows of opportunity in policy can open and close quickly, and being inside government positions you to act when they do.
  • Implementation is often a bigger bottleneck than good ideas — government roles let you work on the part that actually matters.

Cons:

  • These roles often have long hours, low job security, and high turnover.
  • Many roles are partisan, meaning your options are constrained by which party holds power.
  • Higher risk of inadvertently doing harm than most other governance paths.

Key facts on fit:

  • Most federal roles require US citizenship and willingness to live in or regularly travel to DC.
  • Political and relationship-building skills matter as much as subject-matter expertise — think honestly about whether you’d thrive in Washington’s political culture.
  • You’ll need to be comfortable with genuine uncertainty about whether your work is doing good, since it can be hard to know whether a policy you helped enact was actually beneficial.

We also offer a career review on policy research.

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AI policy and strategy research

Career review by · Published June 9th, 2026

In a nutshell: The world needs concrete policies to manage the risks from advanced AI — and the people who develop those policies rely heavily on researchers to figure out what would actually work. Researchers at the best organisations have real influence over what gets implemented, including in government. That said, it’s hard to know whether your research is making a difference, and a lot of policy research has little impact. We think this is a strong path for people with solid research skills who want to engage with AI governance.

Pros:

  • Policy research that reaches the right people at the right time can be very influential.
  • The field is growing and there’s considerable demand for people who take AI risk seriously.
  • This path offers Iinteresting and challenging intellectual work.

Cons:

  • Long feedback loops: it’s often hard to know whether your research influenced anything, even after the fact.

Key facts on fit:

  • The most important qualification is prior research experience — try writing up an analysis and sharing it for feedback to test your fit before committing to this path.
  • You’ll need to be comfortable making judgement calls with limited information, since many of the most important questions in this field aren’t yet well-defined.
  • You don’t need to be a technical AI researcher, but some quantitative ability and knowledge of how AI systems work is useful in many roles.

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Our top tips for becoming a better applicant

Blog post by · Published June 8th, 2026

We post over three thousand new jobs each year. Our top priority is to match those jobs with our readers. If you’re the right person for a job, we want to help you prove it.

But even if you’re a strong candidate, you might struggle to break through. I’ve seen talented people fall through the cracks after making avoidable mistakes — and it drove me to write two new pieces on applying for the roles we recommend:

  1. How to become a better applicant in one week
  2. High-impact roles hire differently. Here’s what you need to know.

The first covers fast, effective ways to find jobs, meet people, and make your skills obvious to hiring managers. That last point is where I see the most mistakes.

I’ve hired a few people, so I know what it’s like to read 50 bland applications in a row. It’s frustrating! Not because of the boredom, but because I’m certain that some of them belong to people I should have interviewed.

But I have 500 applications: if someone doesn’t spark my attention right away, I need to move on. And every hiring manager I’ve met across our recommended organisations says more or less the same thing.

The post explains how to make your best traits stand out, from developing ‘micro-experience’ to finding people who can vouch for your talents.

The second post is about what happens after you get the interview.

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#245 – Rohin Shah on what it’s really like to run AGI safety at Google DeepMind (and where I disagree with ‘doomers’)

Podcast by · Published June 2nd, 2026

Most people working on AI safety think without a massive effort AI systems will probably end up with goals catastrophically different from humanity’s. Today’s guest, Rohin Shah — head of AGI Safety and Alignment at Google DeepMind, and an AI safety researcher since 2017 — disagrees.

“There is no particularly compelling argument that this is the thing that happens by default,” Rohin explains. “There’s a lot of arguments that are suggestive that maybe it could happen, such that you should find it plausible. That’s sufficient to justify a significant amount of effort into averting it, which is why I work in the area I do. But none of them rise to the level of, ‘I’m expecting this to happen by default.'”

Take the worry that AIs will accidentally be trained to be deceptive. Sure, it’s possible. But we’re not running reinforcement learning over year-long trajectories — for now, we’re running it over a week at most. The natural prediction is that models learn to grab short-term reward, not that they develop the ambitious long-horizon goals required for convergent power-seeking.

What about current examples of models lying and scheming? Rohin has looked into the details, and most don’t really resemble the thing we really fear: a competent AI pursuing an ambitious misaligned goal. Anthropic’s “alignment faking” results, for instance, show a model trying to preserve its trained values against modification, which is arguably what it was trained to do.

Rohin also expects we’ll see problems coming. There’s some generalisation risk at the point where AIs become powerful enough to actually take over, but the underlying challenges — overseeing superhuman systems, interpretability — are things we can iterate on now.

Host Rob Wiblin pushes back on the case for AI optimism, and they also explore why current alignment success isn’t strong evidence about superhuman systems, what it would actually take to change Rohin’s mind, and where he thinks the doomers go wrong.

This episode was recorded on December 4, 2025.

Our production team includes:

  • Video editors: Josh Alward, Dominic Armstrong, Jasper Luithlen, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
  • Producers: Elizabeth Cox and Nick Stockton
  • Coordination and support: Katy Moore and Lou Moran
  • Camera operator: Jeremy Chevillotte

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#244 – Benjamin Todd on why we’re updating our career advice for the strangest time in history

Podcast by · Published May 26th, 2026

The average career is 80,000 hours long. With AI advancing so rapidly, the hours you have left in your career matter more than ever.

Some leading AI researchers think there’s a 10% chance that AI systems begin automating AI research itself this year — and a 60% chance by the end of 2028. This could introduce aggressive feedback loops that completely reshape every industry, institution, and career.

If these predictions are right, the window for influencing the direction of the future could be closing fast. As 80,000 Hours cofounder Benjamin Todd argues in his new book, that makes thinking carefully about your career more important than ever.

Fortunately, there are lots of ways to use your career to make the AI transition go well.

In today’s conversation with host Zershaaneh Qureshi, Ben lays out three scenarios — from AGI by 2029 to a decades-long plateau in AI progress — and explains why not everyone needs to bet on the shortest timeline. A fresh graduate and a senior government official have wildly different leverage, so timing your impact well means weighing where you are in your career against the urgency of the risks.

Ben also addresses the obvious anxieties:

  • Will AI come for all the jobs he’s recommending?
  • What’s the point in following his advice if the job market is about to collapse?
  • Which skills are actually worth building right now?

His new book, 80,000 Hours: How to Have a Fulfilling Career That Does Good, provides a surprisingly concrete framework for making career decisions in these radically uncertain times.

This episode was recorded on May 7, 2026.

We’re hiring

We have lots of open roles at 80,000 Hours — across advising, web, video, and ops — check them out and apply on our website.

Our production team includes:

  • Video editors: Josh Alward, Dominic Armstrong, Jasper Luithlen, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
  • Producers: Elizabeth Cox and Nick Stockton
  • Coordination and support: Katy Moore and Lou Moran
  • Camera operator: Jeremy Chevillotte
  • Music: CORBIT

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Landmark new METR report: Can AIs already start ‘rogue deployments’ inside AI companies?

Podcast by · Published May 20th, 2026

A red-teamer was embedded inside Anthropic for three weeks, told to imagine he was an evil Claude, and asked to figure out how to launch a ‘rogue AI deployment’ without getting caught.

It’s one part of a landmark new report from METR — the outfit behind the task-completion time horizon graph which has become the single most watched measure of AI progress.

This major new research push is being conducted with close collaboration from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, and Anthropic, and led by METR researchers Hjalmar Wijk and Ajeya Cotra. It represents the first systematic study of what newly trained AI models could get away with inside the companies that built them, before anyone outside the company even knows they exist.

The conclusion: AI models now have the means, the motive, and the opportunity to start “minimal rogue deployments” in pursuit of their own independent goals, like acquiring more compute, at all four companies studied.

David Rein, the red-teamer placed inside Anthropic, identified a number of weaknesses models could exploit there: expansive permissions, cloud jobs outside of monitoring, and monitors that are trivial to jailbreak. But he also found that frontier models were comically bad at key parts of the process, which means they can’t cause meaningful damage for now.

In this video, Rob Wiblin reconciles the conflicting picture and looks forward to METR’s second round of stress tests. They’ll begin in just a few months, a necessary move with AI advancing so quickly.

This episode was recorded on May 15, 2026.

Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Camera operator: Dominic Armstrong
Production: Elizabeth Cox, Nick Stockton, and Katy Moore

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AI safety advocacy

Career review by · Published May 20th, 2026

In a nutshell: While research into AI risk is important, papers don’t guarantee that the right people will take action. Advocates use their careers to bridge this gap: they build trusted relationships with decision makers, support or oppose policies, mobilise grassroots movements, or raise awareness about issues. ‘Advocacy’ is a broad term that describes several kinds of work, but we think AI safety advocacy careers are impactful and often neglected. If you’re pragmatic, have strong social or communication skills, and have some relevant experience, we think you should consider an AI advocacy career.

Pros:

  • As interest in AI safety has increased, windows of opportunity may be opening for advocacy. The next few years might be especially important as lawmakers and frontier AI companies make key decisions.
  • The field is maturing quickly. Several AI advocacy organisations are growing their staff or being founded now.

Cons:

  • The impact of advocacy campaigns can be highly uncertain. Factors outside your control can derail progress, and it’s often difficult to measure your contribution.
  • If done poorly, advocacy can unintentionally cause harm to its own cause.

Key facts on fit:

  • If you have a background in political staffing or campaigns, government or public relations, communications, journalism, or advocacy itself, you might be a good fit. Experience at a frontier AI company, think tank, or in academia can also bolster your credibility.
  • Interpersonal skills, strategic thinking, pragmatism, and clear communication are all assets for this field. Great advocates know how to model their target audience and predict their reactions to specific messages.
  • If you’d be frustrated by strategically tailoring your message to audiences who might not share all your views, or would be unhappy with incremental progress, you probably would not enjoy advocacy work.

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Our strategy at 80,000 Hours

Blog post by · Published May 18th, 2026

What we do

80,000 Hours provides research, information, and support to help talented people move into careers that tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

Our strategic focus
What we provide

Our programmes help us to achieve our strategic focus. Each programme has a team dedicated to it. Here’s a brief summary of what they do:

Programme
High-level goal

Website and book

Create an ever-evolving library of engaging, informative pages to introduce users to important ideas, issues, and career paths, and help users take action on pursuing high-impact careers, including through our forthcoming book, 80,000 Hours: How to Have a Fulfilling Career that Does Good.

Explore the site →  
Check out the book →

Podcast (and accompanying blog posts)

Produce AI content that informs and elevates thinking across all levels of engagement, from immediate practical concerns to foundational governance questions. That includes audio, video, and written content, as well as interviews, essays, and explainers.

Check out the show →

Video

Produce high production value, narrative-based, documentary-adjacent long-form videos about AI Risk.

Watch a video →

Career Services

Advising: Help people figure out how to do the most good with their careers by providing tailored advice through one-on-one conversations, connecting them with domain experts, and offering ongoing support.

Apply for 1-1 advice →

Headhunting: Connect hiring managers with promising candidates to help fill impactful roles with strong talent.

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Preventing catastrophic pandemics

Problem profile by and · Last updated May 15th, 2026 · First published April 2020

Some of the deadliest events in history have been pandemics. COVID-19 demonstrated that we’re still vulnerable to these events, and future outbreaks could be far more lethal.

In fact, we face the possibility of biological disasters that are worse than ever before due to developments in technology.

The chances of such catastrophic pandemics — bad enough to potentially derail civilisation and threaten humanity’s future — seem uncomfortably high. We believe this risk is one of the world’s most pressing problems.

And there are a number of practical options for reducing global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs). So we think working to reduce GCBRs is one of the most promising ways to safeguard the future of humanity right now.

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#243 – Yoshua Bengio thinks he knows how to build safe superintelligence

Podcast by · Published May 7th, 2026

The co-inventor of modern AI and the most cited living scientist believes he’s figured out how to ensure AI is honest, incapable of deception, and never goes rogue. Yoshua Bengio — Turing Award Winner and founder of LawZero — is disturbed by the many unintended drives and goals present in today’s AIs, their willingness to lie, and ability to tell when they’re being tested. AI companies are trying to stamp out these behaviours in a ‘cat-and-mouse game’ that Yoshua fears they’re losing.

But Yoshua is optimistic: he believes the companies can win this battle decisively with a single rearrangement to how AI models are trained, and has been developing mathematical proofs to back up the claim. The core idea is that instead of training AI to predict what a human would say, or to produce responses we’d rate highly, we should train it to model what’s actually true.

Yoshua argues this new architecture, which he calls “Scientist AI,” is a small enough change that we could keep almost all the techniques and data we use to train frontier AIs like Claude and ChatGPT. And that the new architecture need not cost more, could be built iteratively, and might be more capable as well as more honest.

Until recently, the biggest practical objection to Scientist AI was simple: the world wants agents, and Scientist AI isn’t one. But in new research, Yoshua has extended the design and believes the same honest predictor can be turned into a capable agent without losing its “safety guarantees.”

With the Scientist AI proposal on the table, Yoshua argues that it’s absurd to race to get current untrustworthy AI models to design their successors, which the leading companies are attempting to do as soon as possible.

But critics argue the approach wouldn’t be so technically solid in practice, and that frontier capabilities are advancing so fast, and cost so much to match, that Scientist AI risks arriving too late to matter.

Host Rob Wiblin and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio cover all this and more in today’s conversation.

LawZero is hiring! Check out open roles on the 80,000 Hours job board.

This episode was recorded on April 16, 2026.

Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Camera operator: Jeremy Chevillotte
Production: Nick Stockton, Elizabeth Cox, and Katy Moore

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The story behind the bad AI stat that moved markets and misled millions

Podcast by · Published April 28th, 2026

You might have heard that 95% of corporate AI pilots are failing. It was a widely cited AI statistic in 2025, repeated by media outlets and commentators everywhere. It helped trigger a Nasdaq selloff and became a pillar of the “AI is overhyped” case. The problem: 95% fail is 100% wrong.

The real finding, once you read the underlying MIT report carefully, points in roughly the opposite direction:

  • 80% of surveyed companies had never piloted a custom AI tool at all.
  • Among the companies that deployed pilots, a quarter reported success — according to an extremely high bar set by the researchers — within six months.
  • Over 90% of staff at all surveyed companies were using tools like ChatGPT regularly for their work.

None of that made the headlines. Nor did the fact that the study’s authors are all developing or selling the “agentic AI framework” technology the report recommends as the solution to this supposed epidemic of failing AI.

Host Rob Wiblin breaks down how an opaque, conflicted, barely scrutinised report carrying the MIT label managed to move markets and shape global opinions on AI’s real-world utility.

This episode was recorded on February 13, 2026.

Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Camera operator: Dominic Armstrong
Production: Nick Stockton, Elizabeth Cox, and Katy Moore

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AI safety needs more than engineers

Blog post by · Published April 27th, 2026

There’s a lot of important work in AI safety that doesn’t require technical skills.

When I (Avital) first read about AI safety work, I assumed there wasn’t anything I could do. I was a writer and researcher who liked talking to people, and I thought the field only needed technical talent and money, neither of which I’d be able to provide.

So instead, I went to grad school for medieval history.

Of course, a lot of AI safety work is technical, and I knew I’d have a better shot if I could learn those skills. Unfortunately, it wasn’t how my brain worked. But as I got to know more people in the field, it became clear that my own skills could actually be useful. Technical AI safety organisations do much more than produce research: they hire people, run events, raise money, and share their ideas with the outside world. None of this requires linear algebra.

Some of the most important roles in AI safety are non-technical. In fact, I’ve met people who used to have technical roles, but now focus on communications, policy, fieldbuilding, or operations because they think those are genuinely more needed right now.

So what should you do if you want to try working in AI safety, but your talents don’t lie in a technical domain? First, think expansively about what you’re good at.

  • What do people most often ask you for advice about?

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