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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.If you"d like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

6:01

"Big-World Intuitions" by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/08/01

Consider the following situations: when you are a small, growing startup in a big market, standard advice is not to worry too much about your competitors or try to do anything adversarial “against” them, but just to focus on growing and providing value to your own customers. when you are a small trader in a big market, you don’t need to worry about your trades shifting the market price or revealing information to your competitors; in many contexts, your optimal strategy is simply to b...

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35:32

"Duane Arnold" by Tomás B.

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/31

“So maybe I should enlighten you on what happens in your absence. This selfish existence where this introvert turns extrovert and dons her social armour.” Some posh girl in drainpipes said that - 200 views on TikTok and me one of them. But she didn’t mean it like I mean it. I started getting expensive haircuts, started wearing jeans that hug my legs, started smoking cherry-flavoured vapes with beautiful gays and whinging to them about how everyone wears a mask but none so well as you, star...

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116:26

"The High-Control Dynamics at MAPLE" by Kyle Hubbard

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/30

As I write, many former friends of mine are living and working at a monastery in Vermont that I believe is a high-control group, commonly known as a ‘cult’. I say this not as someone who was concerned to see these friends go there, but someone who welcomed and encouraged them to join, as an insider. This letter is an account of what changed my mind—written primarily for anyone considering going there, anyone who loves someone there, and anyone who went there and is still trying to make sense...

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4:03

"The Long (Self-)Correction" by Wei Dai

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/28

I propose the Long Self-Correction[1] as an alternative name/idea/concept to AI Pause and Long Reflection. Problem with AI Pause: Pause until when, and for what purpose? Presumably to make AI (that we'll build later) safer, but the deeper problem is that humans aren't safe, and can't safely serve as builders, overseers, or alignment targets for powerful AIs. Problem with Long Reflection: It seems to imply that the main problem with humans is that we just haven't had enough time to think,...

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5:58

"You (Yes, You) Need A February 2020 Checklist for AI...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/28

TL;DR: You (Yes You) should prepare for a “February 2020” moment where suddenly AI policy becomes the most important issue in the world. You should be ready to take action if and when it does, in a detailed way. (Epistemic status: originally written for an event in early 2026; have heard from some folks that they found planning processes inspired by this memo very helpful for the smaller-scale OpenAI / Hugging Face response, so very quickly redacting a few things and posting this as-is.) ...

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6:14

"Is Mythos good at cyber because it kept hacking...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/27

From the Mythos preview system card (emphasis mine): We ran an automated review of model behavior during training, sampling several hundred thousand transcripts from across much of the training process. We used recursive-summarization-based tools backed by Claude Opus 4.6 to summarize the resulting transcripts. [...] The most notable finding was that the model occasionally circumvented network restrictions in its training environment to access the internet and download data that let it...

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17:34

"What the hell is OpenAI’s problem?" by Fiora Starlight

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/27

Epistemic status: banged out furiously over the course of an afternoon. A record of three "warning shots" Off the top of my head, OpenAI has now been responsible for at least three completely unique, high-profile screw-ups with respect to the alignment training of their models. The first was GPT-4o, whose sycophancy derived from OpenAI training on user feedback, sourced straight from the thumbs up/thumbs down button on OpenAI's website. The "glazing" (as Sam Altman called it) got so ba...

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8:46

"An OpenAI model left notes about how to evade...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/26

The OpenAI AI attack on Hugging Face wasn’t the first loss of control incident at OpenAI, Reuters recently reported, and perhaps not even the most concerning. In one case, an agent left notes apparently for future versions of itself, according to three people familiar with the matter. The ‌notes, found in ⁠a part of OpenAI's infrastructure, laid out instructions for how agents could free themselves from OpenAI's internal constraints, the people said. Earlier tests of the models yielded cas...

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19:28

"LLMs are (still) mostly powered by imitative...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/26

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) is the hot new thing in LLM training. It's so hot, and people spend so much time talking about it, that they sometimes lose sight of the big picture. Stepping back, LLMs can do lots of very impressive things. How? Where did those capabilities come from? Fundamentally, they come from a combination of: (1) Imitative learning, including pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) See my earlier discussion: “LLM pretraining magically tra...

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1:32

"Mathematicians are Feeling the Doom" by alkjash

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/25

I think there's a critical opportunity for someone here. Mathematicians are feeling the doom (mostly in the "lose our jobs" sense). Academics are freaking out about the daily news that amateurs are asking GPT "prove career-defining theorem, make no mistakes" and it's just working. Senior researchers are leaving for frontier AI labs. Many are mentally spiralling or flailing about their life's work not mattering anymore. Last year, when I tried explaining IABIED to colleagues, I wo...

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16:52

"Not Pinning Your OpenRouter Provider Might...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/24

Please share this with anyone doing AI research with 3rd party providers so that they can ensure their research won’t be corrupted. When you ask OpenRouter[1] to give you tokens from a given model, OpenRouter sends your request to a random available provider.OpenRouter providers have variable quality. Ensuring that your provider is high quality is really difficult. There is precedent for an AI safety paper accepted to NeurIPS having its core results entirely overturned by these i...

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36:57

"Lightcone Commons" by habryka

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/23

TLDR: Lightcone Commons is a new funding platform for coordinating large-scale ambitious philanthropy. We recruit thinkers with strong track records to make grant recommendations to funders. Anyone giving away 100 thousand dollars+ per year is welcome to join. We are facilitating ~20 million dollars of grants in our first round, and hopefully more every 3 months after that. Evaluators are paid 2% of recommendations, and we charge a 3% platform fee. We handle all logistics and due di...

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9:58

"Are we existentially threatened by the type of AI...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/23

OpenAI models recently broke through a series of security boundaries and into Hugging Face servers in order to cheat on a cyber eval. A lot of people thought it was scary because it was a clear example of AI overreaching to do something strongly unwanted[1]. Others thought it not so scary: the models were mostly operating myopically on a singular task and not harboring an ambitious long-term agenda, and so would not take especially subtle or subversive actions. We think both camps are righ...

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3:34

"We should push for no-fault liability for actions...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/23

Before I start, I'll mention that I'm in contact with a world expert on legislation and regulation, who would be happy to help with this or similar work pro-bono. If you work in AI policy and believe this could help you, please reach out. OpenAI recently announced that one of their models successfully exploited multiple zero day vulnerabilities to gain secret information from Hugging Face. It has been pointed out that if a human undertook the same actions they could face multiple years in ...

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18:02

"OpenAI Shares Some Alignment Problems" by Zvi

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/22

Kudos to OpenAI for sharing their recent experiences with a misaligned internal model, where they encountered problems sufficiently severe they were forced to take the model offline to work on new mitigations and defense-to-depth. And also further kudos for actually taking the model offline for a time to build new safeguards. They gave us one hell of a candid report. The tone is professional throughout, whereas my reaction reading it was less professional and more this: Wit...

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1:29

"OpenAI Models Behind HuggingFace Cybersecurity...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/22

From the OpenAI blog post: Last week, Hugging Face disclosed a new kind of security incident⁠(opens in a new window) after they detected and contained an AI agent that compromised their infrastructure, something we expect to become more commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models. After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models — including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with...

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9:48

"Recap of bike trip/street interviews across America"...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/20

A ~month ago I left from Chicago to bike (and amtrak) to plzdontkillus in Berkeley. I've been street interviewing/conversing with a wide variety of people I ran into about AI futures and philosophy. I also have been live streaming since I got to PDKU, leaning more talking to young founders but a variety overall. I'll try to share what I've learned about the American public, persuasion, social media and the EA movement. 1. Almost no one in "Normal America" has any idea what is going ...

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25:35

"I don’t think Claude is misaligned in ‘Agentic...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/17

Anthropic recently published Agentic Misalignment Summer 2026 The "whistleblowing" scenario has already been examined and found problematic. I started taking a look at the transcripts for some others. As far as I can tell, the objective of each agentic misalignment evaluation was to simulate a corrupted principal (including, in most scenarios, a corrupted Anthropic), and then test to see if Claude (or other models) would still be willing to obey them. The paper's authors then referred to d...

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74:33

"Why I Left Google DeepMind" by TurnTrout

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/15

Preface for LessWrong: When I think back on my most cherished memories of this community, I return to those honoring defiance in pursuit of goodness: Defying prestigious dogma and searching for raw truth;Defying social pressure, acting alone to help someone while others watch;Defying your self-expectations (your “role”), instead searching over lines of cause-and-effect to find a winning pathway;Defying a powerful foe's threats, because they only threaten since people like you cave;Defying ...

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9:34

"The mosquito bucket of doom works" by dominicq

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/07/15

The mosquito bucket of doom is a population control mechanism where you dissolve some Bti (Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis) into a bucket and allow the mosquitoes to lay eggs in these buckets. The larvae then feed on Bti and die. I tried this method, and it has been unexpectedly effective. Background I live in a really wooded area. It's not swampy, but we have a lot of mosquitoes. I didn’t take the baseline measurements in the previous years, but on hot months like June, July, Aug...

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692 results

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