80,000 Hours Podcast

Back in December, we released an episode where Rob Wiblin interviewed Nathan Labenz — AI entrepreneur and host of The Cognitive Revolution Podcast — on his takes on the pace of development of AGI and the OpenAI leadership drama, based on his experience red teaming an early version of GPT-4 and the conversations with OpenAI staff and board members that followed.

Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.

In today’s episode, their conversation continues, with Nathan diving deeper into:

• What AI now actually can and can’t do — across language and visual models, medicine, scientific research, self-driving cars, robotics, weapons — and what the next big breakthrough might be.
• Why most people, including most listeners, probably don’t know and can’t keep up with the new capabilities and wild results coming out across so many AI applications — and what we should do about that.
• How we need to learn to talk about AI more productively — particularly addressing the growing chasm between those concerned about AI risks and those who want to see progress accelerate, which may be counterproductive for everyone.
• Where Nathan agrees with and departs from the views of ‘AI scaling accelerationists.’
• The chances that anti-regulation rhetoric from some AI entrepreneurs backfires.
• How governments could (and already do) abuse AI tools like facial recognition, and how militarisation of AI is progressing.
• Preparing for coming societal impacts and potential disruption from AI.
• Practical ways that curious listeners can try to stay abreast of everything that’s going on.
• And plenty more.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire
Transcriptions: Katy Moore