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Top areas to work on
Preventing an AI-related catastrophe
Catastrophic pandemics
Nuclear war
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AI safety technical research
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Operations in high-impact organisations
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2023

December

#176 – Nathan Labenz on the final push for AGI, understanding OpenAI’s leadership drama, and red-teaming frontier models
Podcast
#175 – Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child
Podcast
Benjamin Todd on the history of 80,000 Hours
Podcast (80k After Hours)
Preventing catastrophic pandemics (Updated)
Problem profile
Improving China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risks (Updated)
Career review

November

#170 – Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down
Podcast

October

#169 – Paul Niehaus on whether cash transfers cause economic growth, and keeping theft to acceptable levels
Podcast
#167 – Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption
Podcast
#166 – Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere
Podcast
#165 – Anders Sandberg on war in space, whether civilisations age, and the best things possible in our universe
Podcast

September

#163 – Toby Ord on the perils of maximising the good that you do
Podcast
Alex Lawsen on avoiding 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career
Podcast (80k After Hours)
#162 – Mustafa Suleyman on getting Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI
Podcast

August

#159 – Jan Leike on OpenAI’s massive push to make superintelligence safe in 4 years or less
Podcast

July

#158 – Holden Karnofsky on how AIs might take over even if they’re no smarter than humans, and his four-part playbook for AI risk
Podcast
Hannah Boettcher on the mental health challenges that come with trying to have a big impact
Podcast (80k After Hours)
#156 – Markus Anderljung on how to regulate cutting-edge AI models
Podcast
Working in US AI policy (Updated)
Article

June

AI governance and coordination
Career review
Should you work at a leading AI lab?
Career review
AI safety technical research
Career review
#154 – Rohin Shah on DeepMind and trying to fairly hear out both AI doomers and doubters
Podcast
#153 – Elie Hassenfeld on two big-picture critiques of GiveWell’s approach, and six lessons from their recent work
Podcast
Global priorities research (Updated)
Problem profile

May

#151 – Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us
Podcast
Part 2: Can one person make a difference? What the evidence says. (Updated)
Career guide
Part 6: Which jobs help people the most? (Updated)
Career guide

April

#148 – Johannes Ackva on unfashionable climate interventions that work, and fashionable ones that don’t
Podcast

March

Preventing an AI-related catastrophe (Updated)
Problem profile
Why and how to earn to give (Updated)
Article

February

How much do solutions to social problems differ in their effectiveness? A collection of all the studies we could find.
Blog post

2022

December

#142 – John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction
Podcast
#141 – Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well
Podcast

September

Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project
Podcast (80k After Hours)

August

Preventing an AI-related catastrophe (First published)
Problem profile
What We Owe The Future
Article

June

#132 – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems
Podcast
The case for reducing existential risks (Updated)
Article
Nuclear war (Updated)
Problem profile

May

Let’s get serious about preventing the next pandemic
Blog post

March

#124 – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions
Podcast
Operations management in high-impact organisations (Updated)
Article

February

Space governance
Problem profile
Software engineering
Career review

2021

October

Non-technical roles in leading AI labs
Career review
Help build the effective altruism community
Career review
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India
Podcast
#112 – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
Podcast

August

#110 – Holden Karnofsky on building aptitudes and kicking ass
Podcast
#109 – Holden Karnofsky on the most important century
Podcast
#108 – Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree
Podcast
#107 – Chris Olah on what the hell is going on inside neural networks
Podcast

July

#105 – Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways
Podcast
About us: what do we do, and how can we help? (Updated)
Article

May

#100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome
Podcast

February

#91 – Lewis Bollard on big wins against factory farming and how they happened
Podcast

January

#90 – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be
Podcast

2020

October

#86 – Hilary Greaves on Pascal’s mugging, strong longtermism, and whether existing can be good for us
Podcast

September

Benjamin Todd on varieties of longtermism and things 80,000 Hours might be getting wrong
Podcast

August

Why I’ve come to think global priorities research is more important than I thought
Blog post

July

Building effective altruism (Updated)
Problem profile

May

#78 – Danny Hernandez on forecasting and the drivers of AI progress
Podcast

April

Policy and research ideas to reduce existential risk
Blog post
Preventing catastrophic pandemics (First published)
Problem profile
#74 – Dr Greg Lewis on COVID-19 and reducing global catastrophic biological risks
Podcast

2019

July

#61 – Helen Toner on the new 30-person research group in DC investigating how emerging technologies could affect national security
Podcast

June

#58 – Pushmeet Kohli on DeepMind’s plan to make AI systems robust & reliable, why it’s a core issue in AI design, and how to succeed at AI research
Podcast

April

#56 – Animals in the wild often suffer a great deal. We ask Persis Eskander what — if anything — should we do about that
Podcast

March

#54 – Askell, Brundage & Clark on whether policy has a hope of keeping up with AI advances
Podcast

January

Working in US AI policy (First published)
Article

2018

November

ML engineering for AI safety & robustness: a Google Brain engineer’s guide to entering the field
Article
#47 – PhD or programming? Fast paths into aligning AI as a machine learning engineer, according to ML engineers Catherine Olsson & Daniel Ziegler
Podcast

October

#46 – Philosopher Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness, population ethics, probability within a multiverse, & harnessing the brainpower of academia to tackle the most important research questions
Podcast
#44 – Paul Christiano on how OpenAI is developing real solutions to the ‘AI alignment problem’, and his vision of how humanity will progressively hand over decision-making to AI systems
Podcast

August

#41 – If the US put fewer people in prison, would crime go up? Not at all, according to Open Philanthropy’s renowned researcher David Roodman.
Podcast
#40 – How well can we actually predict the future? Katja Grace on why expert opinion isn’t a great guide to AI’s impact and how to do better
Podcast

July

#37 – Finding the best charity requires estimating the unknowable. Here’s how GiveWell tries to do that, according to researcher James Snowden.
Podcast
#36 – Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruism
Podcast

May

#33 – Oxford’s Anders Sandberg on solar flares, the annual risk of nuclear war, and what if dictators could live forever?
Podcast
#31 – Allan Dafoe on trying to prepare the world for the possibility that AI will destabilise global politics
Podcast
#29 – Where are the aliens? Anders Sandberg on three new resolutions to the Fermi Paradox. And how we could easily colonise the whole universe.
Podcast

April

#27 – The careers and policies that can prevent global catastrophic biological risks, according to world-leading health security expert Dr Tom Inglesby
Podcast

March

Operations management in high-impact organisations (First published)
Article
#23 – Jan Leike on how to become a machine learning alignment researcher
Podcast

February

Improving China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risks (First published)
Career review
#21 – The world’s most intellectual foundation is hiring. Holden Karnofsky, founder of GiveWell, on how philanthropy can have maximum impact by taking big risks.
Podcast

2017

December

#16 – Michelle Hutchinson hopes to shape the world by shaping the ideas of intellectuals. Will global priorities research succeed?
Podcast

October

The case for reducing existential risks (First published)
Article
#12 – Beth Cameron fought Ebola for the White House. Now she works to stop something even worse.
Podcast
#10 – Nick Beckstead on how to spend billions of dollars preventing human extinction
Podcast

September

#8 – Lewis Bollard on ending factory farming as soon as possible
Podcast

August

#5 – Alex Gordon-Brown on making millions for charity each year by working in quant finance
Podcast
#4 – Howie Lempel on why we aren’t worried enough about the next pandemic — and specifically what we can do to stop it.
Podcast
Is it fair to say that most social programmes don’t work? (Updated)
Article

July

Is it fair to say that most social programmes don’t work? (First published)
Article
#3 – Dario Amodei on OpenAI and how AI will change the world for good and ill
Podcast

June

Working at effective altruist organisations
Career review
Guide to working in AI policy and strategy
Article
#1 – Miles Brundage on the world’s desperate need for AI strategists and policy experts
Podcast

March

Building effective altruism (First published)
Problem profile

2016

December

The effective altruism guide to donating this giving season
Blog post

August

AI safety syllabus
Article

June

How to do high impact research (Updated)
Article

April

Nuclear war (First published)
Problem profile
Global priorities research (First published)
Problem profile
Easily preventable or treatable illness
Problem profile
Part 2: Can one person make a difference? What the evidence says. (First published)
Career guide

2015

December

Plan change story: from neuroscience academia to cost-effectiveness research
Blog post
How to pursue a career in research to lower the risks from superintelligent machines: a new career review.
Blog post

November

Why and how to found a (GiveWell) nonprofit
Blog post

July

Think tank research
Career review

June

Donating to Giving What We Can is higher impact than donating to GiveWell recommended charities.
Blog post

February

Researcher position available at Animal Charity Evaluators
Blog post

January

Opportunity to work at JPAL as a Research Associate – just hours left to apply!
Blog post

2014

October

Part 6: Which jobs help people the most? (First published)
Career guide

September

Why and how to earn to give (First published)
Article
How to do high impact research (First published)
Article

August

About us: what do we do, and how can we help? (First published)
Article

February

5 ways to make a big difference in any career
Blog post

2013

November

Thoughts on my experience working at GiveWell
Blog post

July

The Future of Humanity Institute is hiring a high-impact project manager
Blog post

May

Looking for a seriously high impact job using your analytical skills?
Blog post

April

Interview with Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell
Blog post

January

How to make a difference in research: An interview with Nick Bostrom
Blog post

2012

January

High impact interview 1: Existential risk research at SIAI
Blog post

Filter by content type:
All110
Podcasts59
Blog posts18
Key articles11
Career reviews9
Problem profiles7
Podcasts (80k After Hours)4
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80,000 Hours is an Effective Ventures project. Effective Ventures Foundation (UK) (EV UK) is a charity in England and Wales (with registered charity number 1149828, registered company number 07962181, and is also a Netherlands registered tax-deductible entity ANBI 825776867). Effective Ventures Foundation USA Inc. (EV US) is a section 501(c)(3) organization in the USA (EIN 47-1988398). EV UK and EV US are separate charities that collaborate closely under the “Effective Ventures” name.

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