45 - Samuel Albanie on DeepMind's AGI Safety Approach
In this episode, I chat with Samuel Albanie about the Google DeepMind paper he co-authored called "An Approach to Technical AGI Safety and Security". It covers the assumptions made by the approach, as well as the types of mitigations it outlines. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/axrpodcast Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/axrpodcast Transcript: https://axrp.net/episode/2025/07/06/episode-45-samuel-albanie-deepminds-agi-safety-approach.html Topics we discuss, and timestamps: 0:00:37 DeepMind's Approach to Technical AGI Safety and Security 0:04:29 Current paradigm continuation 0:19:13 No human ceiling 0:21:22 Uncertain timelines 0:23:36 Approximate continuity and the potential for accelerating capability improvement 0:34:29 Misuse and misalignment 0:39:34 Societal readiness 0:43:58 Misuse mitigations 0:52:57 Misalignment mitigations 1:05:20 Samuel's thinking about technical AGI safety 1:14:02 Following Samuel's work Samuel on Twitter/X: x.com/samuelalbanie Research we discuss: An Approach to Technical AGI Safety and Security: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01849 Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462 The Checklist: What Succeeding at AI Safety Will Involve: https://sleepinyourhat.github.io/checklist/ Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14499 Episode art by Hamish Doodles: hamishdoodles.com