Podcast Episodes

Holden Karnofsky on dozens of amazing opportunities to make AI safer – and all his AGI takes

For years, working on AI safety usually meant theorising about the ‘alignment problem’ or trying to convince other people to give a damn. If you could find any way to help, the work was frustrating a…

Published on 14 hours ago

Daniel Kokotajlo on what a hyperspeed robot economy might look like

When Daniel Kokotajlo talks to security experts at major AI labs, they tell him something chilling: “Of course we’re probably penetrated by the CCP already, and if they really wanted something, they …

Published on 3 days, 15 hours ago

#224 – There's a cheap and low-tech way to save humanity from any engineered disease | Andrew Snyder-Beattie

Conventional wisdom is that safeguarding humanity from the worst biological risks — microbes optimised to kill as many as possible — is difficult bordering on impossible, making bioweapons humanity’s…

Published on 4 weeks ago

Inside the Biden admin’s AI policy approach | Jake Sullivan, Biden’s NSA | via The Cognitive Revolution

Jake Sullivan was the US National Security Advisor from 2021-2025. He joined our friends on The Cognitive Revolution podcast in August to discuss AI as a critical national security issue. We thought …

Published on 1 month ago

#223 – Neel Nanda on leading a Google DeepMind team at 26 – and advice if you want to work at an AI company (part 2)

At 26, Neel Nanda leads an AI safety team at Google DeepMind, has published dozens of influential papers, and mentored 50 junior researchers — seven of whom now work at major AI companies. His secret…

Published on 1 month, 2 weeks ago

#222 – Can we tell if an AI is loyal by reading its mind? DeepMind's Neel Nanda (part 1)

We don’t know how AIs think or why they do what they do. Or at least, we don’t know much. That fact is only becoming more troubling as AIs grow more capable and appear on track to wield enormous cult…

Published on 1 month, 3 weeks ago

#221 – Kyle Fish on the most bizarre findings from 5 AI welfare experiments

What happens when you lock two AI systems in a room together and tell them they can discuss anything they want?

According to experiments run by Kyle Fish — Anthropic’s first AI welfare researcher — so…

Published on 2 months ago

How not to lose your job to AI (article by Benjamin Todd)

About half of people are worried they’ll lose their job to AI. They’re right to be concerned: AI can now complete real-world coding tasks on GitHub, generate photorealistic video, drive a taxi more s…

Published on 2 months, 4 weeks ago

Rebuilding after apocalypse: What 13 experts say about bouncing back

What happens when civilisation faces its greatest tests?

This compilation brings together insights from researchers, defence experts, philosophers, and policymakers on humanity’s ability to survive an…

Published on 3 months, 2 weeks ago

#220 – Ryan Greenblatt on the 4 most likely ways for AI to take over, and the case for and against AGI in <8 years

Ryan Greenblatt — lead author on the explosive paper “Alignment faking in large language models” and chief scientist at Redwood Research — thinks there’s a 25% chance that within four years, AI will …

Published on 3 months, 3 weeks ago