Things Tom Milton Has Said on Podcasts

“I woke up. I said to Fable 5, keep going. It returned an error. I said, keep going again. It returned an error. I went on Twitter. Fable access had been cut off. And suddenly I had lost a skill set.” — Tom Milton, 80,000 Hours Podcast

Milton runs a hardware company in Sheffield. He describes three days of using a frontier AI model for electronics and mechanical design, then losing access overnight. His worry is that in a compute crunch the US prioritizes domestic users and countries like the UK get cut off.

80,000 Hours Podcast · 2026-10-23 Permalink → Listen →

80,000 Hours Podcast Around 1:44:11 into the episode

Tom Milton

…I also think that our team have honed lots of skills that don't get honed if you live in the bay. There's like honest, good delivery that always works. I mean, the place where this changes is if Frontier AI becomes really important to our delivery pipeline and the UK doesn't get access anymore.

Tom Reed

That's the existential threat, essentially.

Tom Milton

So we already saw this. I had my three days of claused psychosis where I was using the AI systems to do all of this electronics design and mechanical design. And then it was a Saturday morning. I woke up. I said to Fable 5, keep going. It returned an error. I said, keep going again. It returned an error. I went on Twitter. Fable access had been cut off. And suddenly I had lost a skill set. I had the previous day been able to do some electronic design and then I had reverted and I no longer had this skill. And imagine building a company on that. If you're building a company on having access to this intelligence and it gets taken away just like that, that is catastrophic. And my worry would be that as Frontier AI becomes more and more capable, we will, the first thing will be we'll…

Tom Reed

building ultra-secure compute in the UK would be like an absolute priority.

Tom Milton

I think the case against this is whether or not you actually need the frontier of capabilities. Like, do are our engineers fantastic? Yes. Are they literally the best people in the world at electronic design? It's like, I don't know, maybe. But possibly not. Was it okay that we had person number 10…

Tom Reed

an infinite dose response curve. Exactly. So

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“I think if you are a safety researcher, a security researcher in a lab, your most likely route to the Nobel Prize for making AI go well is that you are the one who develops the verification tools that enable a deal.” — Tom Milton, 80,000 Hours Podcast

Asked how optimistic to be about verifying an international AI deal, Milton says the problem is tractable but not solved and still needs a moonshot R&D push. He compares it to the people who built seismology equipment and satellites for nuclear arms control.

80,000 Hours Podcast · 2026-10-23 Permalink → Listen →

80,000 Hours Podcast Around 54:50 into the episode

Tom Milton

there are already track twos happening. Yeah. I think those kinds of efforts are what's needed. And I think this is to mostly academics is the first landing point for these kinds of things. But I think it would be valuable to think about how to make it most legible to Chinese counterparts. But

Tom Reed

…the prototype and you describe that this works, should I be thinking, oh yeah, this is something which we are technically on track to achieve or is this like still miles away? Like I don't have the kind of expertise to know to know this. What should I like? What should my position be? Yeah,

Tom Milton

…victory. And right now, the people who work on this could completely change the field. A marginal person here is going to really accelerate progress. The thing that I'd be most excited about are significant lab efforts happening. The thing that would most help me sleep at night is if the major AI developers had dozen person teams who are focused on making sure that verifiable deals can happen. I think if you are a safety researcher, a security researcher in a lab, your most likely route to the Nobel Prize for making AI go well is that you are the one who develops the verification tools that enable a deal. There was someone who pioneered seismology equipment for nuclear deals. There were people who made these satellites. The team who are going to actually make international deals and AI verifiable are yet not yet defined. And I think sometimes we should find this worrying. We should also find it exciting that you can have a real counterfactual impact on the outcome of AI by putting your effort…

Tom Reed

why does it matter so much that it's people at the labs that are doing it just because they understand everything about how the infrastructure works? Yeah, so I think it

Tom Milton

is important that stuff happens outside the labs as well. And I'm excited about the work we're doing, excited about the work that other teams are doing. But inside the lab, you have a few advantages. You have access to the frontier. You know how fast the frontier of AI is going. You can get…

Tom Reed

Yeah, okay, that's very convincing. And the final thing I really want to wrap my head around here also is like, how true is it that so many of these theories to victory do route through verification mechanisms? You know, you mentioned, okay, if export controls are comprehensive enough and expansive…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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