“AI #168: Not Leading the Future” by Zvi

This is what a lull looks like at this point. The government is having internal arguments. The models are getting improved internally. The coding agent improvements are all what we would expect. There's still a lot happening, including a bunch of cool papers, but I feel able to relax and to take care of some other work while I have the chance. You never know when that chance will be over. Table of Contents From yesterday: Cyber Lack of Security and AI Governance. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Fix everything now. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Travel is harder than it looked. Huh, Upgrades. Opus 4.7 fast mode, Claude Code /goal and agent view. Levels of Friction. AI for tax avoidance. On Your Marks. PrinzBench, ProgramBench and faster harmfulness checks. Get My Agent On The Line. Mona tries to run a cafeteria. Mistakes were made. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Soon. But not quite yet. Fun With Media Generation. Monet does not seem that great. On AI Writing. AI is a hack writer using hack techniques. A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. How to make AI [...] ---Outline:(00:36) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility(02:25) Language Models Dont Offer Mundane Utility(03:26) Huh, Upgrades(04:02) Levels of Friction(05:11) On Your Marks(06:38) Get My Agent On The Line(09:42) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon(11:11) Fun With Media Generation(12:49) On AI Writing(16:05) A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer(18:35) You Drive Me Crazy(19:23) They Took Our Jobs(21:31) The Art of the Jailbreak(21:49) Introducing(22:29) Claude Has Its Limits(23:28) Show Me the Money(25:15) Show Me The Compute(26:58) Quiet Speculations(28:33) Quickly, Theres No Time(29:32) Chip City(30:37) Pick Up The Phone(31:15) The Week in Audio(31:41) Rhetorical Innovation(36:13) Not Leading the Future(42:24) Elon Musk v OpenAI(43:21) People Just Say Things(43:47) People Just Publish Things(44:37) OpenAI Endroses Kosa And SB 315(48:08) The LLMs All Believe Roughly Similar Things(50:45) I Learned It By Reading YOU(01:08:22) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult(01:18:45) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone(01:20:34) Messages From Janusworld(01:22:31) People Worried About AI For Other Reasons(01:23:06) The Lighter Side --- First published: May 14th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E4uEiMSpnYRotfzJX/ai-168-not-leading-the-future --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.