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)

#132 – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems

#132 – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems

If a business has spent $100 million developing a product, it's a fair bet that they don't want it stolen in two seconds and uploaded to the web where anyone can use it for free. This problem exists...

14 Jun 20222h 42min

#131 – Lewis Dartnell on getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world

#131 – Lewis Dartnell on getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world

“We’re leaving these 16 contestants on an island with nothing but what they can scavenge from an abandoned factory and apartment block. Over the next 365 days, they’ll try to rebuild as much of civili...

3 Jun 20221h 5min

#130 – Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, & mental health under pressure

#130 – Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, & mental health under pressure

Imagine you lead a nonprofit that operates on a shoestring budget. Staff are paid minimum wage, lunch is bread and hummus, and you're all bunched up on a few tables in a basement office. But over a fe...

23 Mai 20222h 16min

#129 – James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination

#129 – James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination

The good news is deaths from malaria have been cut by a third since 2005. The bad news is it still causes 250 million cases and 600,000 deaths a year, mostly among young children in sub-Saharan Africa...

9 Mai 20223h 19min

#128 – Chris Blattman on the five reasons wars happen

#128 – Chris Blattman on the five reasons wars happen

In nature, animals roar and bare their teeth to intimidate adversaries — but one side usually backs down, and real fights are rare. The wisdom of evolution is that the risk of violence is just too gre...

28 Apr 20222h 46min

#127 – Sam Bankman-Fried on taking a high-risk approach to crypto and doing good

#127 – Sam Bankman-Fried on taking a high-risk approach to crypto and doing good

On this episode of the show, host Rob Wiblin interviews Sam Bankman-Fried. This interview was recorded in February 2022, and released in April 2022. But on November 11 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried's co...

14 Apr 20223h 20min

#126 – Bryan Caplan on whether lazy parenting is OK, what really helps workers, and betting on beliefs

#126 – Bryan Caplan on whether lazy parenting is OK, what really helps workers, and betting on beliefs

Everybody knows that good parenting has a big impact on how kids turn out. Except that maybe they don't, because it doesn't.Incredible though it might seem, according to today's guest — economist Brya...

5 Apr 20222h 15min

#125 – Joan Rohlfing on how to avoid catastrophic nuclear blunders

#125 – Joan Rohlfing on how to avoid catastrophic nuclear blunders

Since the Soviet Union split into different countries in 1991, the pervasive fear of catastrophe that people lived with for decades has gradually faded from memory, and nuclear warhead stockpiles have...

29 Mar 20222h 13min

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