2025 Highlight-o-thon: Oops! All Bests

2025 Highlight-o-thon: Oops! All Bests

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

  • Kyle Fish explaining how Anthropic’s AI Claude descends into spiritual woo when left to talk to itself
  • Ian Dunt on why the unelected House of Lords is by far the best part of the British government
  • Sam Bowman’s strategy to get NIMBYs to love it when things get built next to their houses
  • Buck Shlegeris on how to get an AI model that wants to seize control to accidentally help you foil its plans

…as well as 18 other top observations and arguments from the past year of the show.

Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/best25

It's been another year of living through history, whether we asked for it or not. Luisa and Rob will be back in 2026 to help you make sense of whatever comes next — as Earth continues its indifferent journey through the cosmos, now accompanied by AI systems that can summarise our meetings and generate adequate birthday messages for colleagues we barely know.

Chapters:

  • Cold open (00:00:00)
  • Rob's intro (00:02:35)
  • Helen Toner on whether we're racing China to build AGI (00:03:43)
  • Hugh White on what he'd say to Americans (00:06:09)
  • Buck Shlegeris on convincing AI models they've already escaped (00:12:09)
  • Paul Scharre on a personal experience in Afghanistan that influenced his views on autonomous weapons (00:15:10)
  • Ian Dunt on how unelected septuagenarians are the heroes of UK governance (00:19:06)
  • Beth Barnes on AI companies being locally reasonable, but globally reckless (00:24:27)
  • Tyler Whitmer on one thing the California and Delaware attorneys general forced on the OpenAI for-profit as part of their restructure (00:28:02)
  • Toby Ord on whether rich people will get access to AGI first (00:30:13)
  • Andrew Snyder-Beattie on how the worst biorisks are defence dominant (00:34:24)
  • Eileen Yam on the most eye-watering gaps in opinions about AI between experts and the US public (00:39:41)
  • Will MacAskill on what a century of history crammed into a decade might feel like (00:44:07)
  • Kyle Fish on what happens when two instances of Claude are left to interact with each other (00:49:08)
  • Sam Bowman on where the Not In My Back Yard movement actually has a point (00:56:29)
  • Neel Nanda on how mechanistic interpretability is trying to be the biology of AI (01:03:12)
  • Tom Davidson on the potential to install secret AI loyalties at a very early stage (01:07:19)
  • Luisa and Rob discussing how medicine doesn't take the health burden of pregnancy seriously enough (01:10:53)
  • Marius Hobbhahn on why scheming is a very natural path for AI models — and people (01:16:23)
  • Holden Karnofsky on lessons for AI regulation drawn from successful farm animal welfare advocacy (01:21:29)
  • Allan Dafoe on how AGI is an inescapable idea but one we have to define well (01:26:19)
  • Ryan Greenblatt on the most likely ways for AI to take over (01:29:35)
  • Updates Daniel Kokotajlo has made to his forecasts since writing and publishing the AI 2027 scenario (01:32:47)
  • Dean Ball on why regulation invites path dependency, and that's a major problem (01:37:21)


Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Music: CORBIT
Coordination, transcripts, and web: Katy Moore

Episoder(333)

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#156 – Markus Anderljung on how to regulate cutting-edge AI models

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Bonus: The Worst Ideas in the History of the World

Bonus: The Worst Ideas in the History of the World

Today’s bonus release is a pilot for a new podcast called ‘The Worst Ideas in the History of the World’, created by Keiran Harris — producer of the 80,000 Hours Podcast.If you have strong opinions abo...

30 Jun 202335min

#155 – Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after

#155 – Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after

As AI advances ever more quickly, concerns about potential misuse of highly capable models are growing. From hostile foreign governments and terrorists to reckless entrepreneurs, the threat of AI fall...

22 Jun 20233h 12min

#154 - Rohin Shah on DeepMind and trying to fairly hear out both AI doomers and doubters

#154 - Rohin Shah on DeepMind and trying to fairly hear out both AI doomers and doubters

Can there be a more exciting and strange place to work today than a leading AI lab? Your CEO has said they're worried your research could cause human extinction. The government is setting up meetings ...

9 Jun 20233h 9min

#153 – Elie Hassenfeld on 2 big picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and 6 lessons from their recent work

#153 – Elie Hassenfeld on 2 big picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and 6 lessons from their recent work

GiveWell is one of the world's best-known charity evaluators, with the goal of "searching for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar." It mostly recommends projects that help the...

2 Jun 20232h 56min

#152 – Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion

#152 – Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion

What is the nature of the universe? How do we make decisions correctly? What differentiates right actions from wrong ones?Such fundamental questions have been the subject of philosophical and theologi...

19 Mai 20233h 26min

#151 – Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us

#151 – Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us

Imagine you are an orphaned eight-year-old whose parents left you a $1 trillion company, and no trusted adult to serve as your guide to the world. You have to hire a smart adult to run that company, g...

12 Mai 20232h 49min

#150 – Tom Davidson on how quickly AI could transform the world

#150 – Tom Davidson on how quickly AI could transform the world

It’s easy to dismiss alarming AI-related predictions when you don’t know where the numbers came from.For example: what if we told you that within 15 years, it’s likely that we’ll see a 1,000x improvem...

5 Mai 20233h 1min

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