EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

16:40

“Swarm Scaling” by Toby_Ord

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/22

Audio note: this article contains 36 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Just how powerful are large swarms of AI agents? And how do their powers scale as more and more agents are added to the swarm? We’ve seen two large and extremely capable swarms from OpenAI in the last few months: 1,200 agents were being evaluated separately, but found a way to illicitly set up a message board and coordinate as a

en-gb

16:09

“Advice for prospective incubators” by Aidan...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/22

Often folks hit us up because they are thinking of starting an incubator and want advice. Typically their motivation is that they have a list of specific things they want built that no one is building or because they think an ecosystem needs more new projects or more talent absorption generally to deploy more funding effectively. Here are six questions we often ask prospective teams, to help them figure out what to do. If you're incubator-curious, we recommend asking them of yourself. This is a

en-gb

14:32

“What even is an incubator?” by Aidan Alexander,...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/21

This is part one of a two-part series. Part two (the six questions we ask people trying to incubate new organizations) is coming out on Monday.“Incubator” is a very vague term. It tells you very little about what the organization actually does. All it tells you is that they cause new projects to exist. But that's the outcome. The activities that get you there can vary enormously. This is a framework for people who want more good organisations to exist. When trying to get a particular type of

en-gb

4:24

“Pacing the Frontier: A Framework & Research Agenda”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/20

Below is the executive summary from our new paper at pacing.tech. The full paper is available on the site and as a PDF. The full author list is Raymond Douglas, Charles Dillon, Nikola Moore, Gavin Leech, Shahar Avin, Mathias Kirk Bonde, Rohit Krishnan, Noah Perez, Nathan Young, Cormac Slade Byrd, Stephen Casper, Jan Kulveit, & David Duvenaud “Pacing AI” usually refers to how to conclusively handle the most extreme risks in the face of race dynamics. However, even for the goal of handling

en-gb

14:22

“You can’t join the secret inner circle of cool...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/20

I, and a lot of other people I know, seem to believe something like this: Somewhere out there, there are the cool, high-impact effective altruists who are really having a positive effect on the world. They are all invited to lots of awesome parties with other cool, high-impact effective altruists. They know all kinds of secrets that us normal people don’t know, and they laugh at us for our out-of-touch takes. They can get jobs and grants by having a fifteen-minute conversation with a friend or a

en-gb

1:58

“YCombinator companies still aren’t growing faster...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/18

A year ago I posted that YCombinator (YC) companies didn’t seem to be growing faster since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. I reran that experiment and found that 2023+ YC companies are arguably growing a bit faster than pre-2023 companies (including AfterQuery, YC's fastest-ever unicorn), but the difference isn’t large relative to the underlying variance. It's worth noting that YC has somewhat fallen from grace: the most valuable AI startups are generally not incubated by YC. Nonetheless, it's

en-gb

7:50

“How we might actually pace the frontier: A proposal...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/18

TL;DR This is a proposal for AI companies to conduct public “pacing exercises”, such as halting all pre-training and RL for 2 to 3 days. Each exercise could announce its scope in advance and publish findings afterwards, including the evidence of compliance and any limits to what they could verify. Companies could invite independent evaluators to help identify the evidence needed before the exercise, and to assess compliance during the exercise. The exercises could be repeated every 1 to 3 months to

en-gb

15:14

“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: One Year Closer”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/17

In celebration of still being alive and fighting, we are giving away 1,000 Amazon e-books of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”. Feel free to send a copy to yourself, a loved one, or a friend—we need all hands on deck. Today marks exactly one year since If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, hit bookshelves as an instant bestseller. It was praised by many voices, ranging from Whoopi Goldberg to Steve Bannon to Yoshua Bengio,

en-gb

7:11

“The Crisis Task Force” by brentonmayer

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/17

tl;dr: when a crisis with major implications for your organisation unfolds, consider setting up a crisis task force. It should have its own org chart and adopt norms which are better suited for a crisis. Most organisations aren’t set up to work well in a crisis. At 80,000 Hours, we found three things tend to go wrong. Work slows down across the org, because staff are worried and distracted. Lots of people individually follow the news, duplicating each other's work, before anyone can say what it

en-gb

26:16

“Results from the Population Ethics Quiz” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/16

Two weeks ago, I released a population ethics quiz. 582 people took it. Here's what I learned from reading the responses.Cross-posted from my website. Preamble, and a new edition of the quiz I was worried that I'd only get like four people taking the quiz. But that turned out not to be a problem, because people really like taking quizzes! Even when they're about difficult philosophical subjects! Some people even reported that this quiz helped them learn about population ethics. That wasn't part

en-gb

36:31

“Building a Stronger Vegan Movement Through...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/15

Note: This post is written in a personal capacity. The views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of any organisation I’m affiliated with. I'm grateful to Aaron Boddy, Elizabeth Crewe, Sebastian Joy, Aidan Kankyoku, Tobias Leenaert, Ginny Messina, and Felix Werdermann for their valuable input and feedback, which does not imply endorsement of the views presented. In this post, I aim to show that messaging in the vegan movement often understates the challenges and uncertainties of

en-gb

2:29

“It’s time to vote” by Michelle_Hutchinson

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/15

It's been a pretty crazy week in terms of the world waking up to the risks from AI. I’m hoping that the future is a bit safer this week than it was last. Certainly more people are realising the significant action needed to slow down AI development. In my day job, I’m mostly thinking about how we can put out content about how to increase the safety of the future as we approach TAI. But I’m planning to take tomorrow off from that to go to Westminster with PauseAI to call on the Prime Minister to

en-gb

1:40

“Dario Amodei: “We Must Pace The Frontier”” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/15

[...] Along with my co-founders and employees, I have grappled with this duality of risk and benefit since the beginning of Anthropic. Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers, while building it too fast is reckless. We have sought a middle way: to show that it's possible to build carefully and succeed commercially, and to make safety something on which AI companies compete. In other words, to create a race to the top. We

en-gb

5x in a year" by Chris Clay🔸&source_url=https%3A%2F%2Fforum.effectivealtruism.org%2Fposts%2FhFAushcPhTwJiy9u9%2Fthe-uk-has-quietly-downgraded-biorisk-worst-case-scenarios&created_at=2026-09-14T13%3A46%3A23.202262%2B00%3A00&duration=333" data-stream-description-author="EA Forum Podcast (All audio)" data-stream-description-title="“The UK has quietly downgraded Biorisk Worst-Case Scenarios >5x in a year” by Chris Clay🔸" data-stream-link-author="/podcasts/detail?p=749174&q=cat%3A%22technology%22">

5:33

“The UK has quietly downgraded Biorisk Worst-Case...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/15

The National Risk Register is a morbidly fascinating document I've stumbled across recently. It aims to provide the UK Government's public-facing opinion on what the most serious risks facing the UK are. It's unclear how much this document is used in justifying internal decisions made across UK Government. However, one document its cited in is the Pandemic Preparedness Strategy. One of the headline figures of this register is the Impact-Likelihood matrix across all risks. The important numbers to

en-gb

21:45

“Community (Part 1: From FTX to Manifund) |...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/15

Caroline Ellison has accepted a role at Manifund, to develop our funding platform and research how to effectively direct philanthropic dollars. Austin Chen and Caroline Ellison, “Caroline Ellison has joined Manifund.” Listen to this post 1. Introduction This is Part 1 of a new series, Community. The effective altruist and rationalist communities are strange beasts. They are often impenetrable to outsiders and frequently misunderstood. However, understanding the structure of these communities is

en-gb

8:24

“Announcing BluePerch, a new animal welfare fund...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/14

Author: Grace Ryba (she/her), Executive Director TL;DR: BluePerch is a new animal welfare grantmaker. Grant applications aren't open yet - we're aiming to open applications in roughly mid-2027. We welcome early expressions of interest from potential grantseekers so we can notify you when applications open - express your interest here or see further details below. We're also seeking board members to help run BluePerch; details below. BluePerch BluePerch is a new animal welfare fund seeking to make

en-gb

5:53

“I want us to be better [some feelings]” by brentonmayer

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/14

I loved Phoebe's Updates from the Swarm and George's Alone again: facing the possibility of AI takeover as the world sleepwalks on. I think it's a good time for sharing big feelings, so here's an essay which rhymes with theirs. I drafted most of it in 2022, which was also a time of big feelings for me. I grew up in a small town surrounded by good people. My mum stayed at work late to help women through labour and my dad really tried to lead the Rotary Club in helping our community. I had some

en-gb

7:18

“Too many people in EA underprice the cost of a bad...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/13

Summary: Good work helps build a good reputation, but it's not the only factor. Reputation also requires making your work legible, building relationships with stakeholders, and communicating with them consistently over time. I think many people in EA systematically underestimate what a bad reputation costs, largely because those costs are invisible. You can see the people who stick around. You can't see the people who decided not to work with you. I close with some practical suggestions for

en-gb

9:39

“EA Should Invest in Animal Liberation and Diet...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/13

I want to start by noting that I am enthusiastic about everything that the EA animal welfare movement has accomplished. I am enthusiastically supportive of all of the campaigns that make living and dying conditions less bad for farmed animals. I worked on such campaigns for almost 20 years, and I'm incredibly proud of that work. That said, I do think it's a strategic error that the EA animal movement has so thoroughly moved on from advocacy for animal liberation and diet change. There are two

en-gb

7:22

“What the Pro-Democracy Movement Knows About Quitting...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/13

Tl;dr I sawKabir's post on LessWrong and thought the argument could be strengthened by a framework from the pro-democracy field, which sorts defections intobreaking (leave, visibly and publicly) andbinding (stay and work from the inside). They can be further divided into the actions ofspeaking, acting, and standing in the way. Research by Dr. Jonathan Pinckney at the University of Texas at Dallas and Claire Trilling at SNF Agora Johns Hopkins on "defections" from authoritarian regimes or during

en-gb

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Lead With AI

Tamara Nall

The Tech Trek

Elevano

Engineering the Intelligent Enterprise

PRASAD BHONDE

The Vergecast

The Verge

Double Tap

Steven Scott, Shaun Preece, Steven...