Person
Benjamin Todd
Benjamin Todd co-founded 80,000 Hours, the careers-advice organisation of the effective altruism movement, and now writes about how individuals should orient their lives and work if transformative AI is close — timelines, skills that survive automation, and what preparing for AGI actually looks like.
Commentary by Benjamin Todd
From the commentary rail — every link leaves the site for the original piece.
- 11 September 2026 · Benjamin ToddWhat the world still misunderstands about Hugging FaceIt’s not a cybersecurity problem
- 7 July 2026 · Benjamin ToddWhat would actually reduce AI risk11 priorities for surviving the AI transition
- 25 May 2026 · Benjamin ToddA 15-year search for the world's most pressing problemWhy moved from global health to AI and pandemics ten years ago, and what we're focused on today.
- 3 May 2026 · Benjamin ToddAre the last 3 months the start of an AI acceleration?Most public commentary is debating whether AI has hit a plateau.
- 19 April 2026 · Benjamin ToddFour reasons it's hard to make AI do what we wantA primer on why to expect misalignment
- 22 March 2026 · Benjamin ToddDo we already have AGI?What AGI means, and why we don’t have it yet.
- 5 December 2025 · Benjamin ToddHow AI-driven feedback loops could make things very crazy, very fastA primer on the intelligence explosion
- 29 November 2025 · Benjamin ToddThe environment is a terrible reason to avoid ChatGPTPeople are saying you shouldn’t use ChatGPT due to statistics like:
- 11 July 2025 · Benjamin ToddAI is the most rapidly adopted technology in history7 charts of real world AI deployment
- 24 June 2025 · Benjamin ToddHow not to lose your job to AIThe skills AI will make more valuable (and how to learn them)
- 29 April 2025 · Benjamin ToddShould you quit your job – and work on risks from AI?In five years, we could have AI systems capable of accelerating science and automating skilled jobs.
- 9 April 2025 · Benjamin ToddShortening AGI timelines: a review of expert forecastsAs a non-expert, it would be great if there were experts who could tell us when we should expect artificial general intelligence (AGI) to arrive.
- 6 April 2025 · Benjamin ToddWill we have AGI by 2030?In recent months, the CEOs of leading AI companies have grown increasingly confident about rapid progress:
- 22 March 2025 · Benjamin ToddHow to make AI go well: a summaryI’m writing a new guide to careers to help AGI go well. Here's a summary of the key messages as they stand.
- 20 March 2025 · Benjamin ToddThe most important graph in AI right now: time horizonTo understand how close we are to transformative AI, here’s the metric I find most interesting right now: how long are the tasks AI can do?
- 12 February 2025 · Benjamin ToddTeaching AI to reason: this year's most important storyMost people think of AI as a pattern-matching chatbot – good at writing emails, terrible at real thinking.
- 8 February 2025 · Benjamin ToddGary Marcus says AI can't do things it can already doThe problem of criticising AI using outdated models
- 12 January 2025 · Benjamin ToddHow quickly could robots scale up?Some notes on robot economics.
- 22 December 2024 · Benjamin ToddHow to prepare yourself for AGIWhat if artificial general intelligence (AGI) arrives in just a couple of years, triggering an explosion in science and technology that transforms life as we know it?
- 29 November 2024 · Benjamin ToddWhy a US AI "Manhattan Project" could backfire: notes from conversations in ChinaMy recent two weeks in China suggested something surprising about its AI landscape: the biggest bottleneck isn't compute – it's commitment.
- 19 May 2024 · Benjamin ToddThe most interesting startup idea I've seen recently: AI for epistemicsIf transformative AI might come soon and you want to help that go well, one strategy you might adopt is building something that will improve as AI gets more capable.
- 12 May 2024 · Benjamin ToddHow much AI inference can we do?Suppose you have a bunch of GPUs.
- 30 April 2024 · Benjamin ToddAI stocks could crashAnd this could have implications for timelines and AI safety.
- 29 April 2024 · Benjamin ToddThe market expects AI software to create trillions of dollars of value by 2027Does that seem high or low to you?