creators

Toby Ord - Oxford researcher on existential risk

Toby Ord is a Senior Researcher at the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, author of The Precipice and founder of Giving What We Can with Will MacAskill.

Toby Ord is an Australian moral philosopher whose work is on existential risk — the threats that could destroy humanity's long-term potential — and, increasingly, on the governance of artificial intelligence. He is a Senior Researcher at the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative at the University of Oxford, sits on the board of the Centre for the Governance of AI, and is a research affiliate at Forethought. In November 2009 he founded Giving What We Can with Will MacAskill and Bernadette Young, a society whose members pledge at least 10% of their income to the charities they judge most effective; Oxford states that its 8,000 members have donated more than $300 million. He also helped start the wider effective altruism movement. He was a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, which closed on 16 April 2024. His 2020 book "The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity" argues that humanity faces unprecedented risks this century, from engineered pandemics to unaligned AI, and that safeguarding our future is among the most pressing and neglected issues we face. His recent writing, on his own site, analyses how AI systems scale: reinforcement-learning efficiency, inference-scaling, and how agents' success rates fall as tasks lengthen. He has advised the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the OECD and the UK Prime Minister's Office.

Specialization

existential risk, AI governance, moral philosophy, effective altruism

Country

United Kingdom