Writing - Toby Ord

How much information is in a photograph?

The automation of mathematics has been going on for more than a century.

No-one knows when AI will begin having transformative impacts upon the world.

Contrary to my earlier hypothesis, AI agents probably don't have a constant hazard rate / half-life.

There is an extremely important question about the near-future of AI that almost no-one is asking.

The current era of improving AI capabilities using Reinforcement Learning (from verifiable rewards) involves two key types of scaling: Scaling the amount of compute used for RL during training Scaling the amount of compute used for inference during deploy…

In the last year or two, the most important trend in modern AI came to an end.

The new scaling paradigm for AI reduces the amount of information a model can learn from per hour of training by a factor of 1,000 to 1,000,000.

Building on the recent empirical work of Kwa et al. (2025), I show that within their suite of research-engineering tasks the performance of AI agents on longer-duration tasks can be explained by an extremely simple mathematical model — a constant rate of…

The shift from scaling up the pre-training compute of AI systems to scaling up their inference compute may have profound effects on AI governance.

Improving model performance by scaling up inference compute is the next big thing in frontier AI.

AI capabilities have improved remarkably quickly, fuelled by the explosive scale-up of resources being used to train the leading models.

In the years since I wrote The Precipice, the question I’m asked most is how the risks have changed.

(PDF available) I show how a standard argument for advancing progress is extremely sensitive to how humanity’s story eventually ends.

The choice of discount rate is crucially important when comparing options that could affect our entire future.

Work towards reducing existential risk is likely to happen over a timescale of decades.

Imagine if we could somehow show the people of the eighteenth century a simple child’s toy from today — say, a speaking doll.

A eulogy for Peter Eckersley Delivered at his official memorial service Internet Archive, San Francisco, 4 March 2023 Twenty-six years ago, I sat down in an underground room at Melbourne University.

What is the chance your vote changes the outcome of an election?