The BasePeople

Tom Milton

CEO, Amodo Design

Titles as the sources gave them. In 1 entry, with 5 checked quotations.

What they said

Newest first. Each quotation was found word for word in the source.

“Zero. I think we would probably just shut down the data centres.”
Tom Milton on how we could verify a US–China deal on AI80,000 Hours, October 23, 2026. Speaking as: Other. Asked which hardware verification tools could be used if a US–China deal had to be struck next month.
“And lots of what verification is doing is reducing the cost to complying with some kind of slowdown. So at first it might be turning the data centre on and off, then it might be serving only inference”
Tom Milton on how we could verify a US–China deal on AI80,000 Hours, October 23, 2026. Speaking as: Other. Explaining why verification matters for a multilateral slowdown in frontier AI training.
“So maybe only 50 engineers in the world are working on AI verification right now, on compute verification.”
Tom Milton on how we could verify a US–China deal on AI80,000 Hours, October 23, 2026. Speaking as: Other. Comparing the size of the field with the US Project Vela effort to detect nuclear tests.
“I think the current position is something like: it’s tractable but not solved. There are small but competent teams working on this, but we still need a moonshot R&D project to happen.”
Tom Milton on how we could verify a US–China deal on AI80,000 Hours, October 23, 2026. Speaking as: Other. Asked how close compute verification is to being usable for a real deal.
“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.”
Tom Milton on how we could verify a US–China deal on AI80,000 Hours, October 23, 2026. Speaking as: Other. On what AI companies should do about verification research.

In the Base

Every entry they appear in.

  1. Podcast80,000 HoursSpeaks

    Tom Milton on how we could verify a US–China deal on AI

    In a 109-minute 80,000 Hours interview, Amodo Design CEO Tom Milton describes a pilot that reruns a cluster's inference on a separate verifier and checks its network traffic, argues that such verification would let a US–China training pause continue without shutting data centres, and estimates that about 50 engineers worldwide work on compute verification.