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80,000 Hours is an independent nonprofit that provides free research, career advice, and support to help people find careers that effectively tackle the world's most pressing problems. The organization's name refers to the roughly 80,000 hours a typical person spends working over the course of their career.
Founded in July 2011 at the University of Oxford by Ben Todd and Will MacAskill, 80,000 Hours began as a student society before becoming a full-time organization in 2012. It was one of the founding projects of the effective altruism movement. The organization operated as part of the Centre for Effective Altruism and later Effective Ventures Foundation until completing a spin-out on April 1, 2025, when it became two independent UK entities: 80,000 Hours Limited (a not-for-profit company) and 80,000 Hours Foundation (a registered charity)…
80,000 Hours believes that helping talented individuals redirect their careers toward the world's most pressing problems is one of the highest-leverage interventions available. Their theory of change rests on the premise that the approximately 80,000 working hours in a typical career represent an enormous resource that most people underutilize for social impact due to inadequate career guidance and a lack of awareness about which problems matter most. By conducting rigorous research to identify the most pressing global problems (currently led by AI safety), providing free career advice and coaching, curating high-impact job opportunities, and directly placing people into critical roles through headhunting, 80,000 Hours aims to shift the talent pipeline toward existential risk reduction. The organization believes that getting more capable people working on AI safety, biosecurity, and other catastrophic risks during the current critical period will meaningfully reduce the probability of existential catastrophe. Each career plan change represents decades of future work redirected toward humanity's most important challenges.
Manifund funding goal
Closed Sep 15, 2024
$500 minimum · $1.5M ideal
Fundraising data from grantmaking.ai, updated .
View on grantmaking.ai80,000 Hours was co-founded in 2011 by philosopher Will MacAskill and Benjamin Todd, emerging from Oxford University's effective altruism community and incubated by the Centre for Effective Altruism. The organization takes its name from the approximate number of working hours in a career, reflecting its mission to help individuals maximize the impact of that time.
The problem profiles program is one of 80,000 Hours' most influential research outputs. These are long-form, regularly updated analyses of the world's most pressing problems, each structured around the question: given limited time and talent, which problems offer the most promising opportunities for a high-impact career? The framework evaluates problems on three dimensions: scale (how many people are affected and how severely), neglectedness (how much resources are already directed at it), and tractability (whether progress is realistically achievable)…
80,000 Hours’ problem profiles programme aims to help readers choose higher-impact careers by identifying which global problems offer the greatest leverage for doing good. The profiles apply the organisation’s framework of scale, neglectedness, and tractability to compare issues such as risks from advanced AI, engineered pandemics, great power conflict, and factory farming. By publishing detailed, regularly updated analyses and rankings of the world’s most pressing problems, the programme intends to shift readers toward working on issues where additional talent is most needed and can be most effective, thereby increasing expected impact per career.
The 80,000 Hours Podcast is the flagship audio program of 80,000 Hours, a UK-based nonprofit that helps people identify and pursue high-impact careers. Launched in 2017, the podcast quickly became one of the most influential shows in the effective altruism and AI safety communities, known for its exceptionally long and substantive interview format.
The show is hosted primarily by Rob Wiblin, Head of Research at 80,000 Hours, who studied genetics and economics at the Australian National University. Luisa Rodriguez, who previously served as Chief of Staff at the Forethought Foundation, serves as a second host. Keiran Harris is the long-serving producer. The podcast features guests from a wide range of backgrounds including AI researchers, policymakers, economists, philosophers, biosecurity experts, and activists.
In 2022, 80,000 Hours launched a sister show, 80k After Hours, to accommodate more eclectic and experimental formats that fell outside the main podcast's scope. The main podcast remained focused on in-depth career and cause-area interviews…
The 80,000 Hours Podcast seeks to change listeners’ career plans and priorities by exposing them to unusually in‑depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and how they can use their careers to help solve them. The show invites experts and practitioners across academia, policy, industry, and advocacy to analyse the case for and against working on different issues and approaches, with recent emphasis on advanced AI risks. By giving a large, engaged audience high-quality information and arguments, and highlighting concrete career paths, the podcast aims to shift listeners into more impactful roles and into work on top‑priority problem areas, especially safely navigating the transition to powerful AI.
AI In Context is a video production initiative created and operated by 80,000 Hours, an Oxford-based nonprofit focused on career guidance for high-impact work. The program launched in July 2025 with a long-form video exploring the AI 2027 scenario · a speculative but detailed account of how transformative AI might reshape the world within just a few years. The debut video went viral within days, reaching 8.9 million views and adding approximately 197,000 new subscribers to the channel.
The program is hosted by Aric Floyd and produced under the leadership of Chana Messinger, 80,000 Hours' Head of Video. The production team includes director Phoebe Brooks, director of photography Nick Dolph, editor Zach Joseph, graphics and animation artists Daniel Recinto and Mila Graf, and other collaborators. Filming takes place primarily in San Francisco. Each video costs approximately $50,000 · $90,000 in direct production expenses, plus substantial staff time from 80,000 Hours employees, bringing total per-video costs to roughly $126,000 · $174,000…
AI In Context is designed to reach broad public audiences with cinematic, narrative‑driven videos about transformative AI, its risks, and what people can do about them, in order to ultimately move more talent and attention into work that helps society navigate the transition to powerful AI systems. Produced by 80,000 Hours and hosted by Aric Floyd, the channel aims to inform, entertain, and energise viewers about AI‑related existential risks and concrete actions, complementing 80,000 Hours’ more traditional research and advising. By turning complex AI risk arguments into accessible stories that attract millions of views and large subscriber growth, the programme seeks to expand and diversify the pool of people motivated to seek further information from 80,000 Hours and pursue high‑impact, AI‑focused careers.
# Project summary
We provide research and support to help people move into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems\. We currently provide four main programmes to achieve this:
The 80,000 Hours Job Board is a free, publicly accessible platform that aggregates and curates job opportunities at mission-driven organizations working on global priorities such as AI safety and alignment, biosecurity, and other areas that 80,000 Hours considers the world's most pressing problems. It operates as a core product of 80,000 Hours Limited, a not-for-profit company registered in England and Wales, which was founded in 2011 by Ben Todd and Will MacAskill as part of the effective altruism movement.
The board's curation process involves three steps: sourcing roles by monitoring organizational vacancy pages, consulting domain experts, and accepting external submissions; reviewing each listing against criteria related to direct impact or career capital development; and publishing vetted roles in a searchable, filterable interface at jobs.80000hours.org. Roles are included if they contribute to solving identified key problems or provide valuable career development for those seeking future impact. Listing a role does not constitute an endorsement of the entire organization, only the specific position…
The 80,000 Hours Job Board aims to increase the number of people working on the world’s most pressing problems by directing talented job-seekers toward especially promising roles. The team curates a list of publicly advertised vacancies that are "handpicked" to help users tackle pressing global problems with their careers, prioritising positions that either directly contribute to solving key global issues (such as AI safety and biosecurity) or build substantial career capital for future impact. By vetting roles against these criteria and then driving large volumes of targeted traffic to them, the job board intends to shift marginal hires at high-impact organisations and thereby increase total work going into priority cause areas.