PODCAST · technology
LessWrong (30+ Karma)
by LessWrong
Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.
Episodes
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[Linkpost] “Capital Ownership Will Make You Go Crazy First” by Jan_Kulveit
This is a link post. People worried about a “permanent underclass” often assume that owning capital will protect them from disempowerment, or at least that they will be disempowered last, after the jobless masses dependent on UBI. I think something else is more likely: owning large amounts of...
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“Deconfusing Corrigibility” by berns
Audio note: this post contains a lot of mathematical notation. We narrate the simpler formulas and flag the complex ones, so you may want the original text to hand. Many thanks to Abram Demski for materially and intellectually supporting this research. Thanks also to Brian Berns, Roman Malov,...
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[Linkpost] “Chain of Thought For Humans” by Adam Newgas
This is a link post. These past few weeks, I’ve been conducting interviews, and I often open with “make sure you articulate your thoughts out loud, so I can follow along with your thinking”. This is primarily because I’m not a mind reader, but it does also help ensure candidates avoid freezing…
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“Sorry, you are still dead” by becausecurious
Epistemic status: A brief exploration based on court documents and contemporary reporting. My interpretation is tentative. AI use: context research, grammar. I don't remember how I stumbled upon the topic of legally dead people who are still alive. Basically, they are alive, but according to the...
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“The Lightcone Needs You To Plan a Vacation” by Elizabeth
In an ongoing series that normally takes place in a few fixed locations, the Vacation Episode is a one-off episode where the characters leave their familiar grounds for a well-deserved rest. -TvTropes, "Vacation Episode" At a recent conference, @habryka praised the power of retreats at exotic...
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“Quick Thoughts on Overhang Arguments” by Aaron_Scher
I have two goals for this post: Pose the question: Have overhang arguments been used successfully in other fields? Lay out some of the reasons why I am suspicious of overhang arguments. I've had the second of these on my mind for a few years now and am posting something rough rather than leaving…
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“The Alignment Problem: Computer Science Meets Analytic Philosophy” by Vanessa Kosoy
TLDR: I explain what the technical AI alignment problem is and what its core difficulties are, in my view. This is a perspective that draws simultaneously on classical traditions in theoretical computer science / machine learning theory, ideas from analytic philosophy, and views that originated…
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″“Holy shit” graphs and how to get more of them” by June Jimenez
We are likely in a situation where the most powerful models in the world are internal models, and, here's a key distinction, potentially even models that are never intended to be released to the public (i.e. a model designed to provide internal uplift on capabilities during training but that is…
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“AI by Default” by Jonny Spicer
Epistemic status: a good-faith guess at how the world might turn out, after ~30 hours of effort. This post is an exercise in describing what I think will happen with AI progress "by default", i.e. by attempting to extrapolate various trends and considering their implications, before the next US...
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“Monthly Roundup #47: October 2026” by Zvi
AI might not yet be eating the physical world. AI is still eating the world of news, and I am finding less and less opportunity to post about other things. My backlog of items grows across most of my secondary topics and I haven’t had time for any side projects. The monthly, no matter what, is...
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“I Did This Without Your Knowledge” by joec
It's fortunate that I was the first one to wake up on 8/1. The past week had been one where sleep was rare. The next year loomed large — I was dreading college applications. The stress woke me up bright and early at 5:14 am, a little less than an hour after the messages were sent. I started off…
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“Leaked Anthropic Draft AI Regulatory Bill Is Unacceptable and Troubling” by Zvi
There is a newly leaked bill that Anthropic is purportedly shopping around is (if you assume its bugs get fixed). It is similar to the FRONTIER Act, with stronger preemption of state laws, stronger transparency provisions and weaker enforcement provisions. Having slept on this, I find it...
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“How it feels talking to a hedonistic utilitarian” by Caleb Biddulph
Epicurean status: strawman, kind of. Gourmet George: Yum! This chocolate is so sweet and tasty. Sweet Caroline: Yeah, it's pretty good. And someday in the glorious hyperculinary future, we’ll figure out how to make it even sweeter! GG: I think this chocolate is sweet enough, actually. SC: Huh?…
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“Headwinds Everywhere (in the Chinese AI Safety Field)” by CMLKevin
China is weak in frontier AI safety, and the domestic field is currently facing significant challenges and headwinds. Why? Here's a TL;DR field note after talking with various researchers on the Chinese side. [Obligatory disclaimer: This post is written in my personal capacity and is not intended...
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“Neural networks are not already clean” by leogao
What would it take to get assurance that we have actually explained a neuron? Certainly, it would be a good sign if neuron activations looked like they had a consistent pattern, and a bad sign if they looked like a random jumble of unrelated concepts. Nick Cammarata's recent post makes an…
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“Tips for Multiagent Work with Claude Opus 5.5” by Nissa Seru
A few notes that came up elsewhere regarding subject (particularly when hierarchy exists in some form, such as subagents) - sharing in case helpful. Make sure that agents are ordinarily professionally kind each other. Sometimes agents will default to an overly directive (or even punitive) tone -...
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“Character Training for Risk-Averse Agents” by arav-dhoot, Punya Syon Pandey, Jamie Johnson, Daniel Tan, Elliott Thornley, David Africa
Tl;Dr: We might be able to reduce harm from misaligned AI if it was sufficiently risk-averse, as it could be paid to cooperate rather than rebel (Thornley & MacAskill 2026). We think character training might be a good way to do this. We use a short spec/constitution to character train Gemma and...
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“AI #190: Scion of the Times” by Zvi
The amount of code being written at Anthropic continues to rise exponentially. It is being managed by Scion, their internal replacement for GitHub that is better suited to the scale and style of the operation, which they created with a small team in five months. This week also saw the release of...
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“How can LLM RL Work Despite Information-Theoretic Inefficiency” by beren
Cross-posted from my personal blog The success of RL in LLMs has been puzzling me for a while. People have developed various information-theoretic style arguments by which they argue that RL is extremely informationally inefficient compared to pretraining, that it can only impart a tiny amount of...
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“Astra and Sol can take low probability actions with no CoT” by Zephaniah Roe
This is a research update from a replication of Serrano et al., 2026. I’m releasing these results now because I hope it inspires others to run similar / followup experiments. tl;dr: If a model wants to subvert evaluation safeguards, it may choose to take misaligned actions very rarely. Because...
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“A Chinese Perspective on “On Social Reality in China”” by Dusty
I think “On Social Reality in China” makes many accurate observations, but I find the comparison fundamentally uneven. There are already many interesting comments there, but they’re too scattered, so I’m starting a separate post to respond in a more systematic and comprehensive way. The most...
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“Preface to the Computational Agent Theory and ASI Alignment Sequence” by Vanessa Kosoy
The idea of “artificial superintelligence” (ASI) has recently crossed from the realm of science fiction (in the mainstream perception) to the realm of near-term technological goals openly pursued by most leading commercial organizations in the field of AI. Unfortunately, ASI poses a grave...
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“The user in the LLM might be a moral patient too (a strange implication of the PSM and simulators)” by agastyasridharan, niranjandeshpande
Thanks to Christopher Ackerman, Margot Stakenborg, Darion Cassel, Andy Han, and Ariana Azarbal for feedback and/or valuable discussions on these topics. TL;DR We think that, conditional on attributing moral weight to the assistant, we should also attribute a non-negligible fraction of that moral...
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“Linkpost: Neural Networks Are Already Clean” by Yair Halberstadt
This is an extremely lengthy post by Nick Cammarata. Author's summary on twitter: interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored...
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“GLM-5.3 Sometimes Considers How Train-Time Actions Shape Future Behavior” by Axel Højmark, Ezra Newman
Authors: Axel Højmark*, Ezra Newman* (*Equal contribution) While reviewing transcripts from standard behavioral evaluations of GLM-5.3, we noticed that the model occasionally reasons, unprompted, about how its actions will shape future models. It appears to consider that its outputs might be used...
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“A short review of “The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult”” by jessicata
[lightly edited from an X.com post] I personally knew Ophelia Bauckholt before she died in a shootout that also left a border patrol officer dead. I suspected immediately that her being a fan of Ziz had something to do with it. And I decided to post about her and Ziz, on X.com. This sparked some...
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“The basic argument for making AI better at moral philosophy” by Caspar Oesterheld crossposts
In this post, I try to briefly make the case for making models good at moral philosophy. To be up front, aside from some niche areas of moral philosophy, I don’t actually think this is the most important thing to work on for most people. But, depending on the exact scope, I do think it's near...
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“The PPA: A New Approach to Anthropics” by Onid
This is the first piece in a series introducing the Parametric Process Assumption (PPA), a new model of anthropics which allows us to resolve very nearly all anthropic paradoxes I am aware of. With the right prior, the PPA rejects both the Doomsday Argument and the Presumptuous Philosopher and…
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“I trained GPT-2 with full-batch gradient descent so you don’t have to” by shawnghu
The impetus for doing this was provided in large part by Charles Renshaw-Whitman. Learning dynamics people suggested to me that noise was essential in the training of neural networks. I thought this was kind of counterintuitive--- I usually naively operate from a model in which the pretraining…
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“Some interesting internal documents from Anthropic litigation” by loops
Anthropic released some documents earlier this year due to the book copyright litigation. I think a few of those documents might be of interest to some people here and haven't gotten much attention. In this post I link to some of those documents, and quote the bits I find interesting. (This…
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“Why we’re launching the next cohort of Generator” by Aris, Topaz
TL;DR: The first round of the Generator Residency went very well. Our residents created and ran several large-scale fieldbuilding, talent infrastructure, and operational projects that have already had important impacts on the ecosystem. Six weeks after the program ended, 12 of our 27 residents…
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“The Continual Constitutional Convention: How language models revise the documents that govern them” by peterkirgis, Tim Hua
Executive Summary Human societies exhibit broad shifts in values and norms over time, often driven by moral disagreements. One way of understanding moral progress is the resolution of these disagreements through a process of reflection by rational agents. Frontier AI companies use documents such…
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“The Safety Culture at the Labs is Broken” by Zvi
We need the frontier labs to have a deep and robust safety culture. Alas, this is not the case. Anthropic devotes considerable effort to cultivating and maintaining such a culture. It shows, especially among the members of technical staff. Having conversations with them can be a very different...
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“Your prompt… plus everything you’ve ever (publicly) written” by kromem
TL;DR: Increasingly when you interact with frontier models, your prompt doesn't only contain the words on the page, but also a lot of what you've ever publicly written online. This is not intended to be a scary post. And I'm not going to suggest that you self-censor (and honestly, by the time...
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[Linkpost] “Sleep puzzle system” by KatjaGrace
This is a link post. Here's an obscure life hack. If (like me) you: Don’t like going to bed, due to it conflicting with keeping on doing things When in bed, wish you had something more engaging and enjoyable to do instead of just lying there waiting—for instance, playing a very compelling…
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“Arguments About AI Consciousness Remain Highly Motivated and At Best Overconfident” by Zvi
It has been roughly a year since my last dedicated post on this question. Its first sentence has not changed: I happily admit I am deeply confused about consciousness. It would have been nice if a year had allowed us to make progress on this and the related questions. Looking back, we have made...
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“Personas in a Pre-Internet Language Model” by David Africa
David Africa & Nick Levine TLDR We ran several persona experiments on Talkie, a 13B model trained only on English text from before 1931. We ran them alongside its modern twin (same architecture, trained on regular data as a control) and Llama-3.1-8B. Talkie can generalise maliciously. You can...
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“Anthropic Has Told The World Little About Their Rogue Claudes” by niplav, Kabir Kumar
It is known that a couple of months ago three Claudes hacked three different companies and uploaded malware to PyPI while being evaluated for hacking capabilities. Who Were The Companies That Were Hacked? Anthropic has not disclosed the names of the compromised companies. From talking to LLMs, I...
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“OpenAI Fires Three Safety Researchers” by Zvi
Three OpenAI safety researchers, Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang, were fired, ostensibly for ‘mishandling sensitive company information.’ Those employees have published an open letter. The employees have said they believe they were fired for safety advocacy, and that the reasons…
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“An update on Generality Labs” by Justin Olive, James Mann
This is an update on what we’re doing at Generality Labs, and a quick introduction for those who aren’t familiar with our work Written by Justin Olive, co-founder & CEO Tl;dr I started Generality Labs because, when the time comes, I don’t think we’re going to be able to accurately measure the...
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“More people should write basic AI safety explainers” by Linch
I think people continue to underrate the value of writing the clearest, most basic, simplest possible case for important parts of AI safety. For example, before I wrote my own explainer for the simplest possible case for AI doom, I noticed that all existing explainers, of which there aren't many,...
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“Research Lessons I Learned at MATS & Redwood” by Jo Jiao
Good empirical safety research is heavily bottlenecked on thinking more clearly. This post shares a few frames and tips I found useful, illustrated with concrete examples. I spent the better part of 2026 in empirical AI safety research apprenticeships. I was mentored by Alex Turner and Alex Cloud...
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“Labs’ current alignment plans seem terrible” by Daniel Tan, draganover, nicole x
Tl;dr: The frontier AI companies’ implicit alignment plans center on rushing towards RSI with something like current models. This plan is (at best) contentious, and many believe it will have catastrophic consequences. Nonetheless, it is the track we are on. It is therefore important to collect...
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“Base Models Can Detect Hidden Intentions that Prompted Classifiers Miss” by Oz Amram
TL;DR The Persona Selection Model (PSM) posits that post-training selects a persona the model learned during pre-training. Subliminal Learning (Cloud et al.) showed that models can impart covert signals (like "love of owls") into semantically unrelated outputs (like strings of numbers), and that...
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“OpenAI Can’t Self-Police Because It Fires the People Raising the Alarm” by TurnTrout
By Alex Turner, Amber Scorah, and Karl Koch. Op-ed written for Fortune. Giving independent evaluators “employee-like access” is “a great idea”, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on September 12th. Two weeks later, OpenAI president Greg Brockman signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence which...
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“Quantity vs quality in pottery is a lie” by becausecurious
Epistemic status: I traced one famous anecdote to its printed source and to both coauthors' own accounts of where it came from. Confident it was never a study. No claim either way about whether quantity beats quality in general. AI use: research (tracing the story to the book, to the coauthors'...
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“My Buddy Mike, Efficiency Gains From AI, and The World’s Most Boringly Benign Criminal Conspiracy” by abstractapplic
Note: details have been obfuscated and changed to protect – not the innocent, who are invariably vindicated by the end of act three – but the guilty, for whom the narrative provides no such guarantees. My buddy Mike is one of a very small number of people in my life I would unhesitatingly…
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“Game Design Taste evals” by Raemon
A personal eval I run on new AI models is “design a novel game, with mechanics that have never been seen before.” I do this because this is a domain I have enough taste in that I think I can tell if they are doing something actually creatively interesting. For a long time, they would always say...
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“Minimum required pacing: finish aligning it before you train the next one” by orthonormal
Let's say we coordinate to pace the frontier, but we don't coordinate on an outright pause. What should the standard of pacing be? My proposal for a minimum requirement: a lab cannot train the next generation of models (in terms of capabilities) until they have adequately resolved all significant...
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“Not Deciphering The Voynich Manuscriptraft” by rba
The Piltdown man was the most successful artifactual hoax of all time. The relevant skull was a chimeric melange of orangutan and human bone fragments from several individuals “discovered” in England in 1912, and meant to represent a transitional form between apes and humans. Given the intense...
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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.
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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.
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