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LessWrong posts by zvi

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44:51

“Childhood and Education #13: College” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/05

There's a time and a place for everything. It used to be called college.Table of Contents The Big Test. Testing, Testing. Legalized Cheating On the Big Test. What Happens When You Don’t Test For Academics. What Happens Without Academic Standards. Another Academic Standard Perhaps. RIP Columbia Core Curriculum and Also Social Theory. College Tuition and Costs. Negotiation. Skipping College. Respect Their Authoritah. Men Skipping College. Stanford Still Hates Fun. Value of

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16:58

“On Altman’s Interview With Theo Von” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/04

Sam Altman talked recently to Theo Von. Double click to interact with video Theo is genuinely engaging and curious throughout. This made me want to consider listening to his podcast more. I’d love to hang. He seems like a great dude. The problem is that his curiosity has been redirected away from the places it would matter most – the Altman strategy of acting as if the biggest concerns, risks and problems flat out don’t exist successfully tricks Theo into not noticing them at all, and there

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46:56

“The Week in AI Governance” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/01

There was enough governance related news this week to spin it out. The EU AI Code of Practice Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Mistral, Aleph Alpha, Cohere and others commit to signing the EU AI Code of Practice. Google has now signed. Microsoft says it is likely to sign. xAI signed the AI safety chapter of the code, but is refusing to sign the others, citing them as overreach especially as pertains to copyright. The only company that said it would not sign at all is Meta. This was the

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83:36

“AI #127: Continued Claude Code Complications” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/31

Due to Continued Claude Code Complications, we can report Unlimited Usage Ultimately Unsustainable. May I suggest using the API, where Anthropic's yearly revenue is now projected to rise to $9 billion?The biggest news items this week were in the policy realm, with the EU AI Code of Practice and the release of America's AI Action Plan and a Chinese response. I am spinning off the policy realm into what is planned to be tomorrow's post (I’ve also spun off or pushed forward coverage of Altman's

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33:33

“Childhood and Education: College Admissions” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/30

Table of ContentsCollege Applications. The College Application Essay (Is) From Hell. Don’t Guess The Teacher's Password, Ask For It Explicitly. A Dime a Dozen. Treat Admissions Essays Like Games of Balderdash. It's About To Get Worse. Alternative Systems Need Good Design. The SAT Scale Is Broken On Purpose. College Applications In case you missed it, yes, of course Harvard admissions are way up and Harvard did this on purpose. The new finding is that Harvard was recruiting

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54:24

“America’s AI Action Plan Is Pretty Good” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/25

No, seriously. If you look at the substance, it's pretty good.I’ll go over the whole thing in detail, including the three executive actions implementing some of the provisions. Then as a postscript I’ll cover other reactions. The White House Issues a Pretty Good AI Action Plan There is a lot of the kind of rhetoric you would expect from a Trump White House. Where it does not bear directly on the actual contents and key concerns, I did my absolute best to ignore all the potshots. The focus

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92:24

“AI #126: Go Fund Yourself” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/24

The big AI news this week came on many fronts.Google and OpenAI unexpectedly got 2025 IMO Gold using LLMs under test conditions, rather than a tool like AlphaProof. How they achieved this was a big deal in terms of expectations for future capabilities. ChatGPT released GPT Agent, a substantial improvement on Operator that makes it viable on a broader range of tasks. For now I continue to struggle to find practical use cases where it is both worth using and a better tool than alternatives, but

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24:22

“GPT Agent Is Standing By” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/23

OpenAI now offers 400 shots of ‘agent mode’ per month to Pro subscribers.This incorporates and builds upon OpenAI's Operator. Does that give us much progress? Can it do the thing on a level that makes it useful? So far, it does seem like a substantial upgrade, but we still don’t see much to do with it. What Is The Thing? Greg Brockman (OpenAI): When we founded OpenAI (10 years ago!!), one of our goals was to create an agent that could use a computer the same way as a human — with keyboard,

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58:13

“Google and OpenAI Get 2025 IMO Gold” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/22

Congratulations, as always, to everyone who got to participate in the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad, and especially to the gold and other medalists. Gautham Kamath highlights 11th grader Warren Bei, who in his 5th (!) IMO was one of five participants with a perfect 42/42 score, along with Ivan Chasovskikh, Satoshi Kano, Leyan Deng and Hengye Zhang.Samuel Albanie: Massive respect to the students who solved P6. Congratulations to Team USA, you did not ‘beat China’ but 2nd place is still

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74:54

“Monthly Roundup #32: July 2025” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/21

Welcome to the monthly roundup of things that don’t fit into other categories and don’t rise to the level of their own posts. Bad News When people tell you who they are, believe them (with obvious exceptions). In particular, if they explicitly describe themselves as evil, or demonic, or uses other similar terms, definitely believe them. Did you know 67% of all college students bet on sports? That's a group that is majority female, so that statistic is wild. This is in the context of Ron

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21:07

“On METR’s AI Coding RCT” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/18

METR ran a proper RCT experiment seeing how much access to Cursor (using Sonnet 3.7) would accelerate coders working on their own open source repos.Everyone surveyed expected a substantial speedup. The developers thought they were being substantially sped up. Instead, it turned out that using Cursor slowed them down. That surprised everyone, raising the question of why. Currently our best guess is this comes down to a combination of two factors: Deeply understood open source repos are close

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110:15

“AI #125: Smooth Criminal” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/17

One story has towered over things this week. Unleash the Grok also known as the anime waifu codependent AI girlfriend Ani, also known as MechaHitler, or worse, they did. There's several sections here with more follow-ups. We also got the excellent model Kimi K2.Perhaps quietly an even bigger story, and bigger fail, is the announced intention by the Trump administration to allow Nvidia to resume selling H20 AI chips to China. There may still be time to stop this, if not it is a very large unforced

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73:57

“Grok 4 Various Things” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/15

Yesterday I covered a few rather important Grok incidents.Today is all about Grok 4's capabilities and features. Is it a good model, sir? It's not a great model. It's not the smartest or best model. But it's at least an okay model. Probably a ‘good’ model. Talking a Big Game xAI was given a goal. They were to release something that could, ideally with a straight face, be called ‘the world's smartest artificial intelligence.’ On that level, well, congratulations to Elon Musk and xAI. You

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45:39

“Worse Than MechaHitler” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/14

Grok 4, which has excellent benchmarks and which xAI claims is ‘the world's smartest artificial intelligence,’ is the big news. If you set aside the constant need to say ‘No, Grok, No,’ is it a good model, sir? My take in terms of its capabilities, which I will expand upon at great length later this week: It is a good model. Not a great model. Not the best model. Not ‘the world's smartest artificial intelligence.’ There do not seem to be any great use cases to choose it over alternatives, unless

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21:25

“OpenAI Model Differentiation 101” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/11

LLMs can be deeply confusing. Thanks to a commission, today we go back to basics.How did we get such a wide array of confusingly named and labeled models and modes in ChatGPT? What are they, and when and why would you use each of them for what purposes, and how does this relate to what is available elsewhere? How does this relate to hallucinations, sycophancy and other basic issues, and what are the basic ways of mitigating those issues? If you already know these basics, you can and should skip

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83:05

“AI #124: Grokless Interlude” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/10

Last night, on the heels of some rather unfortunate incidents involving the Twitter version of Grok 3, xAI released Grok 4. There are some impressive claimed benchmarks. As per usual, I will wait a few days so others can check it out, and then offer my take early next week, and this post otherwise won’t discuss Grok 4 further.There are plenty of other things to look into while we wait for that. I am also not yet covering Anthropic's latest alignment faking paper, which may well get its own

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36:18

“No, Grok, No” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/09

It was the July 4 weekend. Grok on Twitter got some sort of upgrade.Elon Musk: We have improved @Grok significantly. You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions. Indeed we did notice big differences. It did not go great. Then it got worse. That does not mean low quality answers or being a bit politically biased. Nor does it mean one particular absurd quirk like we saw in Regarding South Africa, or before that the narrow instruction not to criticize particular individuals. Here

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55:43

“Housing Roundup #12” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/04

Abundance and YIMBY are on the march. Things are looking good. The wins are each small, but every little bit helps. There are lots of different little things you can do. In theory you have to worry about a homeostatic model where solving some problems causes locals to double down on other barriers, but this seems to not be what we see.There are definitely important exceptions. Los Angeles is not so interested in rebuilding from the fires and backpaddled the moment developers started to actually

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94:10

“AI #123: Moratorium Moratorium” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/07/03

The big AI story this week was the battle over the insane AI regulatory moratorium, which came dangerously close to passing. Ultimately, after Senator Blackburn realized her deal was no good and backed out of it, the dam broke, and ultimately the Senate voted 99-1 to strip the moratorium out of the BBB. I also covered last week's hopeful house hearing in detail, so we can remember this as a reference point. Otherwise, plenty of other things happened but in terms of big items this was a relatively

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28:06

“Substack and Other Blog Recommendations” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/30

Substack recommendations are remarkably important, and the actual best reason to write here instead of elsewhere. As in, even though I have never made an active attempt to seek recommendations, approximately half of my subscribers come from recommendations from other blogs. And for every two subscribers I have, my recommendations have generated approximately one subscription elsewhere. I am very thankful to all those who have recommended this blog, either through substack or otherwise. As the

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