Nick Stockton

My plea to all AI lab staff: reassess if your current project is your best opportunity to delay RSI, or stop it blowing up in our face. If it's not, move immediately. There's no time to waste even a week to inertia or politeness. The strategic situation is shifting under our feet, so if you haven't reassessed your options recently, you could easily be wasting your time or possibly making things worse. You have access to info I don't, but here's 8 ways priorities seem to have shifted to me, which I elaborate on in the video: 1. Helping with capabilities advances looks worse than in the past, especially bringing forward RSI 2. Safety & alignment evals need a credibility revolution to stop misleading the public 3. 'Pacing the frontier' is unambiguously necessary, and working to make it happen is a huge new opportunity for talent 4. Chain-of-thought monitoring probably stops working without a big technical and regulatory push to keep it 5. It's worse than ever to patch surface indications of deep structural problems you know aren't getting fixed 6. There's ever less need for altruists to help with primarily commercial work 7. Staff have an ever-shrinking window to organise as a group and collectively shape events 8. There are new opportunities for research impact outside frontier companies that are worth considering I know you're probably some combination of exhausted, overwhelmed, and anxious already. But unfortunately there's no way to escape the need to regularly check in on the high level strategic picture and see where you can slot in to maximum effect. I wish I could do it for you but nobody far from your situation can. Godspeed my friends. (From the 80,000 Hours Podcast, links below.)

METR investigated what a rogue AI could secretly get away with inside a frontier AI lab, in close collaboration with OpenAI, GDM, Anthropic and Meta. Including sending a red-teamer into Anthropic to playact 'evil Claude' for 3 weeks. Here's what stands out to me from their new 320-page report: 00:00 What could an unreleased AI get away with? 01:54 Motive: Why grab more compute? 05:46 Opportunity: YOLO mode and jailbreaks 11:02 Means: Brilliant idiots in data centres 15:45 We have to test unreleased models... 18:29 ...especially if AI R&D is coming in 2028

What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025? Was it just vibes? Faulty analysis? Unexpected technical results? I try to make sense of what drove the wild swings in sentiment: • The great timelines contraction (00:47) • Why timelines went back out again (02:10) • Longstanding reasons AGI could take a long time (11:13) • So what's the upshot of all of these updates? (14:47) • 5 reasons the radical pessimists are still wrong (16:54) • Even long timelines are short now (23:54) (On the 80,000 Hours Podcast, links below.)