EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

EA Forum Team

Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts, posts with 30 karma, and other great writing. If you'd like fewer episodes, subscribe to the "EA Forum (Curated & Popular)" podcast instead.

  1. 1d ago

    “What 27 AI Safety Generalists Are Building This Summer” by Jesse Gilbert🔸, Helena Tran

    This summer, 27 residents came to Berkeley for the first cohort of the Generator Residency, a three-month program for AI safety generalists run by Kairos and Constellation. Residents receive mentorship from experienced generalists and researchers and are working on projects like running workshops for professionals entering AI safety, building a cross-org talent directory, supporting university AI safety groups, serving as chiefs of staff at new and growing organizations, building tools for model welfare and model spec research, and more. See more about each of their projects below. Lateral Workshop Seth Lifland and Jacob Brinton We're running Lateral Workshop, a fully funded three-day program helping experienced professionals explore transitions into AI safety. Many mid-career and senior professionals have skills the field urgently needs, including organizational leadership, government experience, cybersecurity, communications, law, finance, and operations. Yet entering AI safety can be difficult because the ecosystem is unfamiliar, professional networks are limited, and the financial and reputational risks of changing careers are substantial. Held September 11 to 13 in Berkeley, Lateral Workshop will bring together promising professionals and people already working in AI safety through expert talks, small-group discussions, one-on-one conversations, and a community mixer. The program aims to make the field [...] --- Outline: (00:56) Lateral Workshop (02:26) Jeff Alstott's Chief of Staff (03:04) Forward-deployed AI engineering for AI safety orgs (04:17) Improving management in AI safety (04:59) Talent Commons (06:06) Various projects to support university groups (06:45) Longitude DC Intensive (07:47) Praxis: a retreat for world-class debaters, past and present (08:46) Fellowship improvements (09:26) Running Leaf and ecosystem support (10:22) More Quality AI Safety Org Founders (11:54) Supporting the AI 2040: Plan A launch (12:37) Convening Discussions on Frontier AI (13:11) Regional Organizers for University Talent Ecosystems (14:22) Building the map for AI character and model specs (15:56) Convening Team Chief of Staff (17:25) Miscellaneous Fieldbuilding (19:01) Other residents (19:27) Want to do something like this? --- First published: August 12th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gyPcpsgvbANjcaLdF/what-27-ai-safety-generalists-are-building-this-summer --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

  2. 1d ago

    “Mental health challenges in the AI safety ecosystem seem like a big problem” by JulianHazell

    A tough lesson I learned over the past few years is that it's pretty stressful to work in the “Please Don’t Build the Torment Nexus” ecosystem, especially as it increasingly seems like the world is hell-bent on building the Torment Nexus. This is what it can feel like to be an impact-pursuing person who stumbles into the AI safety field. It's hard to be productive when you’re stressed and anxious. And setting aside productivity, it's also just plain bad if people working on AI safety — My peers! My people! — are feeling distraught. Anxiety about AI risk really f*****g sucks. If you feel this way, you aren’t alone. I’m right by your side, biting my nails, whitening my knuckles. But even besides me, a lot of people seem to feel this way. How big of a problem is this? Survey data described in Spencer Greenberg's recent 80k episode implies that mental health challenges for people working on AI safety are fairly common: Most respondents experienced psychological challenges — the median person reported six different problems. More than half (52%) said these challenges at least moderately hurt their effectiveness, while 45% had considered cutting back or leaving. The most common [...] --- Outline: (01:03) How big of a problem is this? (03:06) What is being done about it? (04:18) What else should be done about it on the margin? The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: August 11th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ews9xbzjGGfR64oum/mental-health-challenges-in-the-ai-safety-ecosystem-seem --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

  3. 2d ago

    “Closing the LTFF, Spending Down Funds, and a New AI Fund at EA Funds” by calebp

    The current Long Term Future Fund (LTFF) fund managers and I have decided to step back from our work on the LTFF. Because we believe LTFF donors trusted the fund managers to ensure that the funds would be used in line with the purposes of their donation, we've decided the right move is to close the fund. While LTFF is closing, note that EA Funds has launched a new fund, called the Transformative AI Fund (TAIF), with a large overlap in scope, funding early-stage projects that reduce risks from powerful AI systems, led by Lowe Lundin. It is open for applications and donations now. Some LTFF Fund managers plan to continue part-time grantmaking via the AI Risk Mitigation Fund and Lightcone Commons. LTFF fund managers have discussed what to do with the remaining balance of the LTFF. We see our duty to LTFF donors as maximising the expected impact of the money they entrusted to us, within the scope of the fund. Closing a fund involves trade-offs in how to honour that. With that in mind, we have decided to transfer the remaining balance to [new fund], structured as follows: Up to three-quarters will be distributed under the direct [...] --- Outline: (02:04) Why are we moving on from the LTFF? (03:06) Situational Awareness and Quickly Reorienting (04:51) Competing Opportunities (05:18) Institutional Friction (06:27) Why Is EA Funds Starting a New Fund Making AI Safety Grants? (07:00) What will happen with remaining funds? (08:20) Why Lightcone Commons? (10:15) Why Support the New CEA AI Focussed Fund? (11:04) What do existing LTFF applicants need to do? The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: August 11th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dtZ9wbKWjtvGWDRJx/closing-the-ltff-spending-down-funds-and-a-new-ai-fund-at-ea --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  4. 2d ago

    “What would make us scale or stop? NOVAH’s pre-commitment before seeing the RCT results” by I.J.J., AlexisAt

    TL;DR NOVAH (No Violence At Home) was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact) in 2024 to test a promising idea: preventing intimate partner violence through edutainment, in our case a serialised radio drama. Over the past two years we have produced and aired two seasons in Rwanda. We are currently evaluating our second season through a randomized controlled trial with 2,400 couples in Rwanda in partnership with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). Preliminary results are expected in October 2026. The end-line analysis is run by IPA and our academic partners, not by NOVAH. Edutainment to prevent intimate partner violence is promising, but it is still young as a field. We do not want to spend donor money scaling it unless the evidence shows it works at least as well as the strongest existing approaches. The RCT is what will tell us that. Therefore, before seeing those results, we want to make our decision rule public: We will scale our programming only if the RCT finds a statistically significant relative reduction of at least 5% in physical or sexual intimate partner violence prevalence. How quickly we proceed will depend on the size and certainty of the effect. Our current [...] --- Outline: (00:14) TL;DR (02:04) Background on NOVAH's cause area and intervention (04:03) How we are evaluating our impact (05:54) Our pre-commitment (07:10) What happens under each result? (07:14) Effect below 5%, or not statistically significant: pause and explore (07:47) Effect of 5%-20%: continue as planned (08:15) Effect above 20%: accelerate (08:33) Why did you choose a 5% reduction? (09:37) Is everything driven by this RCT? (10:55) Why make this public? (11:29) How you can hold us to this (12:00) Should more non-profits do this? (12:37) Final words (13:09) Learn more and get in touch (13:41) Appendix (13:47) Why do you use IPV-year instead of DALYs in your cost-effectiveness? --- First published: August 11th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Lz42uekYDBmBweq9f/what-would-make-us-scale-or-stop-novah-s-pre-commitment --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  5. 2d ago

    “The Acuity Problem: Maybe we can’t infer how intensely a being can feel from the number of different intensity levels it can go through” by Jim Buhler

    Summary A lot of scientific evidence has been gestured at to show how wide an organism's welfare range (i.e., the absolute intensity at the end of the affective spectrum) might be. But most (if not all) of this evidence is in fact evidence of evaluative acuity (i.e., how many differentiable gradients of pain and pleasure the spectrum contains). (§2) In theory, a cognitively simple organism could feel either nothing or something extreme, and nothing in between. And a complex one could dissociate between trillions of different pain levels between nothing and a pinprick, and never feel anything worse. Acuity and range can be independent. (§1) In practice, there may be evolutionary reasons to expect some dependence, but this does not tell us how strong it would be or what the dependence relationship looks like. This is in tension with what many arguments for prioritizing some species over others have implicitly assumed so far—I’m talking about both arguments for prioritizing less numerous cognitively complex beings over many simpler ones, and arguments for the exact opposite. Call this the acuity problem. (§3) The consequence is that the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the moral weights we should assign to different species is even [...] --- Outline: (00:15) Summary (02:06) 1. Acuity vs Range (04:00) 2. Purported evidence for cross-species varying degrees of sentience is evidence for varying acuity (07:19) 3. How dependent are acuity and range? (10:52) 4. The resulting deep uncertainty and its implications (14:19) Acknowledgements The original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: August 10th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mjGQWSpQgdndPnC5b/the-acuity-problem-maybe-we-can-t-infer-how-intensely-a --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

  6. 3d ago

    “EA Funds is launching the Transformative AI Fund” by Lowe Lundin

    TL;DR The Long-Term Future Fund is closing down, and EA Funds is launching the Transformative AI Fund with a new full-time team. The fund's primary focus is technical AI safety and AI governance (including post-AGI governance), as well as supporting fields such as field-building and forecasting. We'll also consider non-GCR implications of transformative AI such as flourishing futures and digital sentience, though we expect these to be a small minority of grants. For now, biosecurity and nuclear will only be supported at the AI intersection. The fund will provide funding that is early-stage, fast, and tolerant of failure, to build the field's absorptive capacity. We're betting that a lot of philanthropic money is about to arrive, and that the field doesn't have enough organizations to put it to work. We aim to always be open to applications, respond quickly and reliably, and publish quarterly reports on what we fund and why. Whether you're an individual, a new organization, or an existing organization with a new idea, you can apply here. We’re actively fundraising. We have a seed grant of ~1 million dollars, but hope to raise significantly more, as we believe there are sufficient opportunities in the field to [...] --- Outline: (01:49) Background (02:54) Purpose (06:50) Focus areas (07:50) Team (09:44) Fund principles (09:47) Early-stage funding (10:36) Transparent by default (11:25) Open applications with quick, reliable responses (12:44) Why give to the Transformative AI Fund? (12:49) Why give through a fund? (14:21) Why this fund? (15:02) How to get involved (15:05) If you're a donor (15:36) If you're starting something new (15:50) If you're interested in working with us --- First published: August 11th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dYuNi5Rh68o9YKstg/ea-funds-is-launching-the-transformative-ai-fund --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  7. 3d ago

    “EA Animal Welfare Fund: Request for Proposals for Cage-Free Laying Hen Welfare” by Zoë Sigle 🔹, eleanor mcaree

    Priority deadline: October 15, 2026. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, and we encourage earlier submission for time-sensitive work. Apply here. Summary The EA Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) is seeking proposals that accelerate the cage-free transition for laying hens at scale, especially in Asia, Latin America, and Africa (although we are open to applications from other regions, too). The majority of the world's laying hens are still confined in barren battery cages, and the fastest growth in egg production is in the Global South, where cage-free markets are least developed. Corporate cage-free commitments now cover a meaningful share of egg supply in many countries, but a commitment converts to animal impact only when three things are in place: accountability that holds companies to their word, supply-side capacity that makes cage-free eggs available to buy, and a local enabling environment of clear cage-free standards. AWF funds the entire pipeline of cage-free transitions—from corporate commitments, to accountability campaigns, to producer technical support, to supply chain innovation, to mandatory labelling policy, to cage egg policy bans. In 2026, we plan to deploy 15 million dollars+ towards a cage-free future for laying hens. This request for proposals is an open application. After [...] --- Outline: (00:28) Summary (01:45) What we are funding (01:49) Cage-free technical implementation, Global South (03:41) Cage-free corporate campaigns and accountability, Global South (05:26) Cage-free legislation and accountability, EU (06:37) Lower priority interventions (07:05) Grant sizes and duration (07:55) What we will not fund (08:22) How we evaluate (08:52) Eligibility (09:32) How and when to apply --- First published: August 5th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/x4sn7JHdkwvAPmuDr/ea-animal-welfare-fund-request-for-proposals-for-cage-free --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  8. 4d ago

    “Most donors get risk wrong” by Jack Lewars

    Linkpost for my Substack piece, lightly adapted. Donors are holding AI wealth at enormous risk. Their giving is often extremely risk-averse. “What is the most common mistake donors make?” This is one of the questions I get asked most as a donation adviser. Often, I say that it's risk tolerance. Many donors have risk backwards. They hold the money they plan to give at close to maximum risk, often in a single company's stock, then give it away at close to minimum risk, backing only the most heavily evidenced organisations. Getting it the right way round means working at three levels: de-risk the wealth that funds your giving, diversify your grant portfolio, and take more risk inside it. What do most donors get wrong about risk? Candidly - almost everything. The majority of individual donors are distributing risk carelessly across multiple axes. Take the distribution of risk between wealth and grantmaking, for example. Many donors are taking extremely large risks with their capital, whilst only giving to massive organisations backed by 24 randomised controlled trials (RCTs). That's two risk decisions taken with the same money, sometimes without noticing either. AI equity holders are a clear case. Many [...] --- Outline: (01:04) What do most donors get wrong about risk? (02:10) How much risk should I take with my charitable giving? (05:25) How should I spread risk across my giving? (08:53) How should I balance evidence and risk in my donations? (11:16) Do charities need RCTs before I fund them? (13:11) I'm expecting an AI windfall. What should I do? --- First published: August 4th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/acRFgvqQPCSHFeLE5/most-donors-get-risk-wrong --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

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About

Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts, posts with 30 karma, and other great writing. If you'd like fewer episodes, subscribe to the "EA Forum (Curated & Popular)" podcast instead.

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  • Creator
    EA Forum Team
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    250
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

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