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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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36:47

“Grounding Value Learning in Evolutionary Psychology:...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/23

Epistemic status: I've been thinking about this topic for about 15 years, which led me to some counterintuitive conclusions, and I'm now writing up my thoughts concisely. Value Learning Value Learning offers hope for the Alignment problem in Artificial Intelligence: if we can sufficiently-nearly align our AIs, then they will want to help us, and should converge to full alignment with human values. However, for this to be possible, they will need (at least) a definition of what the phrase 'human

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5:37

“Announcing Gemma Scope 2” by CallumMcDougall

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/22

TLDR DeepMind LMI is releasing Gemma Scope 2: a suite of SAEs & transcoders trained on the Gemma 3 model family Neuronpedia demo here, access the weights on HuggingFace here, try out the Colab notebook tutorial here[1] Key features of this relative to the previous Gemma Scope release: More advanced model family (V3 rather than V2) should enable analysis of more complex forms of behaviour More comprehensive release (SAEs on every layer, for all models up to size 27b, plus multi-layer models

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4:28

“Entrepreneurship is mostly zero-sum” by lc

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/22

Suppose Fred opens up a car repair shop in a city which has none already. He offers to fix the vehicles of Whoville and repair them for money; being the first to offer the service to the town, he has lots of happy customers. In an abstract sense Fred makes money by he's creating lots of value (for people that need their cars fixed), and then capturing some fraction of that value. The BATNA of the customers Fred services was previously to drive around with broken cars, or buy new ones. Whoville can

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36:53

“Recent LLMs can use filler tokens or problem repeats...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/22

Prior results have shown that LLMs released before 2024 can't leverage 'filler tokens'—unrelated tokens prior to the model's final answer—to perform additional computation and improve performance. [1] I did an investigation on more recent models (e.g. Opus 4.5) and found that many recent LLMs improve substantially on math problems when given filler tokens. That is, I force the LLM to answer some math question immediately without being able to reason using Chain-of-Thought (CoT), but do give the

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9:57

“Irresponsible and Unreasonable Takes on Meetups...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/22

Screwtape, as the global ACX meetups czar, has to be reasonable and responsible in his advice giving for running meetups. And the advice is great! It is unobjectionably great. It's one in the morning. I just ran the east coast rationalist megameetup. A late night spike of my least favourite thing to hear about a meetup I'm running means I'm not going to be able to sleep for a bit. One of my favourite organizers has recently published a list of opinionated meetup takes, saying I have to be

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7:52

“Small Models Can Introspect, Too” by vgel

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/22

Recent work by Anthropic showed that Claude models, primarily Opus 4 and Opus 4.1, are able to introspect--detecting when external concepts have been injected into their activations. But not all of us have Opus at home! By looking at the logits, we show that a 32B open-source model that at first appears unable to introspect actually is subtly introspecting. We then show that better prompting can significantly improve introspection performance, and throw the logit lens and emergent misalignment into

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4:44

[Linkpost] “What’s the Current Stock Market Bubble?”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/22

This is a link post. There's a stock market bubble currently in progress. The key question is: which stocks are unsustainably high? There are a few ways that the current AI boom could turn out to be a mistake (as in AI stocks dropping much below current levels; I'm not commenting here on whether AI will kill us all). Regulations outlaw most new AI development on safety grounds. Financial markets decide that frontier AI companies won't make much profit (my counter-argument). Military action in

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4:58

[Linkpost] “No God Can Help You” by Ape in the coat

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/22

This is a link post. There is a standard pattern in philosophical conversations. People stumble upon their epistemological limitations and then assume that God's existence somehow would’ve solved the problem. For instance, suppose we are talking about Münchhausen trilemma, demonstrating the inability to have completely certain foundation for knowledge. We inspect different horns of the trilemma and then conclude with a sigh: “Oh well, it seems there is no absolute certainty in our world. Unless, of

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30:34

“Can Claude teach me to make coffee?” by philh

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/21

Someone on reddit said, "Remember robots still can't go into a new house and make a coffee." And I thought I actually wonder whether, if I provided the physical actuation, current LLMs would be capable of doing this? Like, through a conversation like: Me: I'm in a house. Your job is to instruct me to make a coffee. I can take photos of my surroundings, I can follow basic directions, and if you ask me to do something too complicated I'll ask for clarification. Here is my current surroundings:

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5:04

“Turning 20 in the probable pre-apocalypse” by Parv...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/21

Master version of this on https://parvmahajan.com/2025/12/21/turning-20.html I turn 20 in January, and the world looks very strange. Probably, things will change very quickly. Maybe, one of those things is whether or not we’re still here. This moment seems very fragile, and perhaps more than most moments will never happen again. I want to capture a little bit of what it feels like to be alive right now. 1. Everywhere around me there is this incredible sense of freefall and of grasping. I realize

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10:19

“Technoromanticism” by lsusr

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/21

Imagine you were born in 2007. The Internet has always existed. Facebook has always existed. Google has always existed. Smartphones have always existed. By the time you became old enough to social media, social media had already evolved from "truly social" to "superintelligent hostile optimization system working tirelessly to grab your attention and mind control you via brainrot, ragebait, and parasocial relationships". By the time you were old enough to drive, all new cars had annoying touchscreen

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6:23

“Digital intentionality: What’s the point?” by mingyuan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/21

Going into November, I wanted to write a sequence of blog posts that would convince people to practice digital intentionality, and show them how to do it. The theory of change was something like: A lot of people have written books on this topic, and they sometimes work to change people's behavior. But the people who need the message the most aren’t reading books, because they can’t. The only things they read are online, so I should write to them online, on a platform that they’re already on, like

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21:43

“The unreasonable deepness of number theory” by wingspan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/21

Audio note: this article contains 162 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. One of the weirdest things in mathematics is how completely unrelated fields tend to connect with one another. A particularly interesting case is the play between number theory (the study of natural numbers <span>_mathbb{N}={0,1,2dots}_</span>) and complex analysis (the study of functions on

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20:58

“Alignment Pretraining: AI Discourse Causes...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/21

TL;DR LLMs pretrained on data about misaligned AIs themselves become less aligned. Luckily, pretraining LLMs with synthetic data about good AIs helps them become more aligned. These alignment priors persist through post-training, providing alignment-in-depth. We recommend labs pretrain for alignment, just as they do for capabilities. Website: alignmentpretraining.ai Us: geodesicresearch.org | x.com/geodesresearch Note: We are currently garnering feedback here before submitting to ICML. Any

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5:51

“Contradict my take on OpenPhil’s past AI beliefs” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/20

At many points now, I've been asked in private for a critique of EA / EA's history / EA's impact and I have ad-libbed statements that I feel guilty about because they have not been subjected to EA critique and refutation. I need to write up my take and let you all try to shoot it down. Before I can or should try to write up that take, I need to fact-check one of my take-central beliefs about how the last couple of decades have gone down. My belief is that the Open Philanthropy Project, EA

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12:06

“How to game the METR plot” by shash42

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/20

TL;DR: In 2025, we were in the 1-4 hour range, which has only 14 samples in METR's underlying data. The topic of each sample is public, making it easy to game METR horizon length measurements for a frontier lab, sometimes inadvertently. Finally, the “horizon length” under METR's assumptions might be adding little information beyond benchmark accuracy. None of this is to criticize METR—in research, its hard to be perfect on the first release. But I’m tired of what is being inferred from this plot,

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3:33

“Claude Opus 4.5 Achieves 50%-Time Horizon Of Around...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/20

An updated METR graph including Claude Opus 4.5 was just published 3 hours ago on X by METR (source): Same graph but without the log (source): Thread from METR on X: We estimate that, on our tasks, Claude Opus 4.5 has a 50%-time horizon of around 4 hrs 49 mins (95% confidence interval of 1 hr 49 mins to 20 hrs 25 mins). While we're still working through evaluations for other recent models, this is our highest published time horizon to date. We don’t think the high upper CI bound reflects Opus's

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15:54

“Opinionated Takes on Meetups Organizing” by jenn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/20

Screwtape, as the global ACX meetups czar, has to be reasonable and responsible in his advice giving for running meetups. And the advice is great! It is unobjectionably great. I am here to give you more objectionable advice, as another organizer who's run two weekend retreats and a cool hundred rationality meetups over the last two years. As the advice is objectionable (in that, I can see reasonable people disagreeing with it), please read with the appropriate amount of skepticism. Don't do

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29:55

“When Were Things The Best?” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/20

People remember their childhood world too fondly. You adapt to it. You forget the parts that sucked, many of which sucked rather really badly. It resonates with you and sticks with you. You think it was better. This is famously true for music, but also in general, including places it makes no sense like ‘most reliable news reporting.’ Matthew Yglesias: Regardless of how old they are, people tend to think that things were better when they were young. As a result, you’d expect more negativity as

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23:54

“A Full Epistemic Stack: Knowledge Commons for the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/20

We're writing this in our personal capacity. While our work at the Future of Life Foundation has recently focused on this topic and informs our thinking here, this specific presentation of our views are our own. Knowledge is integral to living life well, at all scales: Individuals manage their life choices: health, career, investment, and others on the basis of what they understand about themselves and their environments. Institutions and governments (ideally) regulate economies, provide

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