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PODCAST

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

9:42

“SB-1047 Documentary: The Post-Mortem” by Michaël Trazzi

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/08

Below some meta-level / operational / fundraising thoughts around producing the SB-1047 Documentary I've just posted on Manifund (see previous Lesswrong / EAF posts on AI Governance lessons learned). The SB-1047 Documentary took 27 weeks and $157k instead of my planned 6 weeks and $55k. Here's what I learned about documentary production Total funding received: ~$143k ($119k from this grant, $4k from Ryan Kidd's regrant on another project, and $20k from the Future of Life Institute). ...

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48:28

“METR’s Evaluation of GPT-5” by GradientDissenter

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/08

METR (where I work, though I'm cross-posting in a personal capacity) evaluated GPT-5 before it was externally deployed. We performed a much more comprehensive safety analysis than we ever have before; it feels like pre-deployment evals are getting more mature. This is the first time METR has produced something we've felt comfortable calling an "evaluation" instead of a "preliminary evaluation". It's much more thorough and comprehensive than the things we've created before and it explores t...

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36:21

“Emotions Make Sense” by DaystarEld

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/07

For the past five years I've been teaching a class at various rationality camps, workshops, conferences, etc. I’ve done it maybe 50 times in total, and I think I’ve only encountered a handful out of a few hundred teenagers and adults who really had a deep sense of what it means for emotions to “make sense.” Even people who have seen Inside Out, and internalized its message about the value of Sadness as an emotion, still think things like “I wish I never felt Jealousy,” or would have trouble ...

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49:32

“The Problem” by Rob Bensinger, tanagrabeast, yams,...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/06

This is a new introduction to AI as an extinction threat, previously posted to the MIRI website in February alongside a summary. It was written independently of Eliezer and Nate's forthcoming book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and isn't a sneak peak of the book. Since the book is long and costs money, we expect this to be a valuable resource in its own right even after the book comes out next month.[1] The stated goal of the world's leading AI companies is to build AI that is genera...

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9:18

“Many prediction markets would be better off as...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/04

All prediction market platforms trade continuously, which is the same mechanism the stock market uses. Buy and sell limit orders can be posted at any time, and as soon as they match against each other a trade will be executed. This is called a Central limit order book (CLOB). Example of a CLOB order book from Polymarket Most of the time, the market price lazily wanders around due to random variation in when people show up, and a bulk of optimistic orders build up away from the action. Occas...

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4:44

“Whence the Inkhaven Residency?” by Ben Pace

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/04

Essays like Paul Graham's, Scott Alexander's, and Eliezer Yudkowsky's have influenced a generation of people in how they think about startups, ethics, science, and the world as a whole. Creating essays that good takes a lot of skill, practice, and talent, but it looks to me that a lot of people with talent aren't putting in the work and developing the skill, except in ways that are optimized to also be social media strategies. To fix this problem, I am running the Inkhaven Residency. The i...

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10:54

“I am worried about near-term non-LLM AI...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/01

TL;DR I believe that: Almost all LLM-centric safety research will not provide any significant safety value with regards to existential or civilisation-scale risks. The capabilities-related forecasts (not the safety-related forecasts) of Stephen Brynes' Foom and Doom articles are correct, except that they are too conservative with regards to timelines. There exists a parallel track of AI research which has been largely ignored by the AI safety community. This agenda aims to impleme...

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11:30

“Optimizing The Final Output Can Obfuscate CoT...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/31

Produced as part of MATS 8.0 under the mentorship of Alex Turner and Alex Cloud. This research note overviews some early results which we are looking for feedback on. TL;DR: We train language models with RL in toy environments. We show that penalizing some property of the output is sufficient to suppress that property in the chain of thought also, even when that property is relevant to task completion. For example, when we penalize a model for mentioning in its output that it completed a ...

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6:40

“About 30% of Humanity’s Last Exam chemistry/biology...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/30

FutureHouse is a company that builds literature research agents. They tested it on the bio + chem subset of HLE questions, then noticed errors in them. The post's first paragraph: Humanity's Last Exam has become the most prominent eval representing PhD-level research. We found the questions puzzling and investigated with a team of experts in biology and chemistry to evaluate the answer-reasoning pairs in Humanity's Last Exam. We found that 29 ± 3.7% (95% CI) of the text-only chemistry an...

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20:24

“Maya’s Escape” by Bridgett Kay

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/30

Maya did not believe she lived in a simulation. She knew that her continued hope that she could escape from the nonexistent simulation was based on motivated reasoning. She said this to herself in the front of her mind instead of keeping the thought locked away in the dark corners. Sometimes she even said it out loud. This acknowledgement, she explained to her therapist, was what kept her from being delusional. “I see. And you said your anxiety had become depressive?” the therapist said a...

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130:59

“Do confident short timelines make sense?” by TsviBT,...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/26

TsviBT Tsvi's context Some context: My personal context is that I care about decreasing existential risk, and I think that the broad distribution of efforts put forward by X-deriskers fairly strongly overemphasizes plans that help if AGI is coming in <10 years, at the expense of plans that help if AGI takes longer. So I want to argue that AGI isn't extremely likely to come in <10 years. I've argued against some intuitions behind AGI-soon in Views on when AGI comes and on strat...

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67:32

“HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore” by Gretta Duleba,...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/26

Eliezer and I love to talk about writing. We talk about our own current writing projects, how we’d improve the books we’re reading, and what we want to write next. Sometimes along the way I learn some amazing fact about HPMOR or Project Lawful or one of Eliezer's other works. “Wow, you’re kidding,” I say, “do your fans know this? I think people would really be interested.” “I can’t remember,” he usually says. “I don’t think I’ve ever explained that bit before, I’m not sure.” I decided to...

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30:05

“On ‘ChatGPT Psychosis’ and LLM Sycophancy” by jdp

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/25

As a person who frequently posts about large language model psychology I get an elevated rate of cranks and schizophrenics in my inbox. Often these are well meaning people who have been spooked by their conversations with ChatGPT (it's always ChatGPT specifically) and want some kind of reassurance or guidance or support from me. I'm also in the same part of the social graph as the "LLM whisperers" (eugh) that Eliezer Yudkowsky described as "insane", and who in many cases are in fact insane. ...

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10:00

“Subliminal Learning: LLMs Transmit Behavioral Traits...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/23

Authors: Alex Cloud*, Minh Le*, James Chua, Jan Betley, Anna Sztyber-Betley, Jacob Hilton, Samuel Marks, Owain Evans (*Equal contribution, randomly ordered) tl;dr. We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a "student" model learns to prefer owls when trained on sequences of numbers generated by a "teacher" model that prefers owls. This same phenomenon can tr...

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51:27

“Love stays loved (formerly ‘Skin’)” by Swimmer963...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/21

This is a short story I wrote in mid-2022. Genre: cosmic horror as a metaphor for living with a high p-doom. One The last time I saw my mom, we met in a coffee shop, like strangers on a first date. I was twenty-one, and I hadn’t seen her since I was thirteen. She was almost fifty. Her face didn’t show it, but the skin on the backs of her hands did. “I don’t think we have long,” she said. “Maybe a year. Maybe five. Not ten.” It says something about San Francisco, that you ca...

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23:25

“Make More Grayspaces” by Duncan Sabien (Inactive)

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/21

Author's note: These days, my thoughts go onto my substack by default, instead of onto LessWrong. Everything I write becomes free after a week or so, but it's only paid subscriptions that make it possible for me to write. If you find a coffee's worth of value in this or any of my other work, please consider signing up to support me; every bill I can pay with writing is a bill I don’t have to pay by doing other stuff instead. I also accept and greatly appreciate one-time donations of any size...

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3:25

“Shallow Water is Dangerous Too” by jefftk

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/21

Content warning: risk to children Julia and I knowdrowning is the biggestrisk to US children under 5, and we try to take this seriously.But yesterday our 4yo came very close to drowning in afountain. (She's fine now.) This week we were on vacation with my extended family: nine kids,eight parents, and ten grandparents/uncles/aunts. For the last fewyears we've been in a series of rental houses, and this time onarrival we found a fountain in the backyard: I immediately checked the d...

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11:13

“Narrow Misalignment is Hard, Emergent Misalignment...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/18

Anna and Ed are co-first authors for this work. We’re presenting these results as a research update for a continuing body of work, which we hope will be interesting and useful for others working on related topics. TL;DR We investigate why models become misaligned in diverse contexts when fine-tuned on narrow harmful datasets (emergent misalignment), rather than learning the specific narrow task. We successfully train narrowly misaligned models using KL regularization to preserve ...

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2:15

“Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/16

Twitter | Paper PDF Seven years ago, OpenAI five had just been released, and many people in the AI safety community expected AIs to be opaque RL agents. Luckily, we ended up with reasoning models that speak their thoughts clearly enough for us to follow along (most of the time). In a new multi-org position paper, we argue that we should try to preserve this level of reasoning transparency and turn chain of thought monitorability into a systematic AI safety agenda. This is a measure that ...

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12:39

“the jackpot age” by thiccythot

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/14

This essay is about shifts in risk taking towards the worship of jackpots and its broader societal implications. Imagine you are presented with this coin flip game. How many times do you flip it? At first glance the game feels like a money printer. The coin flip has positive expected value of twenty percent of your net worth per flip so you should flip the coin infinitely and eventually accumulate all of the wealth in the world. However, If we simulate twenty-five thousand people flipp...

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445 results

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