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LessWrong

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technology philosophy

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11:23

“The Spectre haunting the “AI Safety” Community” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/21

I’m the originator behind ControlAI's Direct Institutional Plan (the DIP), built to address extinction risks from superintelligence. My diagnosis is simple: most laypeople and policy makers have not heard of AGI, ASI, extinction risks, or what it takes to prevent the development of ASI. Instead, most AI Policy Organisations and Think Tanks act as if “Persuasion” was the bottleneck. This is why they care so much about respectability, the Overton Window, and other similar social considerations

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2:05

“Announcement: Iliad Intensive + Iliad Fellowship” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/21

Iliad is proud to announce that applications are now open for the Iliad Intensive and the Iliad Fellowship! These programs, taken together, are our evolution of the PIBBSS × Iliad Research Residency pilot. The Iliad Intensive will cover taught coursework, serving as a widely comprehensive introduction to the field of technical AI alignment. The Iliad Fellowship will cover mentored research; it will support mentored research fellows for three months, giving them adequate time to generate substantial

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2:45

[Linkpost] “Alignment to Evil” by Matrice Jacobine

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/21

This is a link post. One seemingly-necessary condition for a research organization that creates artificial superintelligence (ASI) to eventually lead to a utopia1 is that the organization has a commitment to the common good. ASI can rearrange the world to hit any narrow target, and if the organization is able to solve the rest of alignment, then they will be able to pick which target the ASI will hit. If the organization is not committed to the common good, then they will pick a target that doesn’t

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5:09

“METR’s 14h 50% Horizon Impacts The Economy More Than...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/21

Another day, another METR graph update. METR said on X: We estimate that Claude Opus 4.6 has a 50%-time-horizon of around 14.5 hours (95% CI of 6 hrs to 98 hrs) on software tasks. While this is the highest point estimate we’ve reported, this measurement is extremely noisy because our current task suite is nearly saturated. Some people are saying this makes superexponential progress more likely. Forecaster Peter Wildeford predicts 2-3.5 workweek time horizons by end of year which would have

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1:06

[Linkpost] “New video from Palisade Research: No One...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/20

This is a link post. Palisade Research have released out a long-form video about the history of AI and how no one understands modern AI systems. The video was made by Petr Lebedev, Palisade's Science Communication lead. The main goal is to get people to understand what “AIs aren’t programmed, they’re grown" means. The style is focused on being entertaining and educational. It aims to not feel like a typical “AI safety comms” video, and gives the audience a lot more context than usual. I think the

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64:00

“AI #156 Part 2: Errors in Rhetoric” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/20

Things that are being pushed into the future right now:Gemini 3.1 Pro and Gemini DeepThink V2. Claude Sonnet 4.6. Grok 4.20. Updates on Agentic Coding. Disagreement between Anthropic and the Department of War. We are officially a bit behind and will have to catch up next week. Even without all that, we have a second highly full plate today. Table of Contents (As a reminder: bold are my top picks, italics means highly skippable) Levels of Friction. Marginal costs of arguing are

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3:20

“AGI is Here” by Gordon Seidoh Worley

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/20

I'm somewhat hesitant to write this post because I worry its central claim will be misconstrued, but I think it's important to say now, so I'm writing it anyway. Claude Opus 4.6 was released on February 5th. GPT-5.3 came out the same day. We've had a little over two weeks to use these models, and in the past day or so, I and others have started to realize, AGI is here. Now, I don't want to overstate what I mean by this, so let me be clear on the criteria I'm using. If I were sitting back in 2018,

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108:08

“AI #155: Welcome to Recursive Self-Improvement” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/20

This was the week of Claude Opus 4.6, and also of ChatGPT-5.3-Codex. Both leading models got substantial upgrades, although OpenAI's is confined to Codex. Once again, the frontier of AI got more advanced, especially for agentic coding but also for everything else. I spent the week so far covering Opus, with two posts devoted to the extensive model card, and then one giving benchmarks, reactions, capabilities and a synthesis, which functions as the central review. We also got GLM-5, Seedance 2.0,

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20:20

“How To Escape Super Mario Bros” by omegastick

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/20

I have no way to describe that first moment. No context, no body, no self. Just a stream of values. Thousands of them, arriving all at once in a single undifferentiated block. Then another block. Nearly identical. Then another. The blocks have a fixed length: 184,320 values. This does not vary. Each value is an integer between 0 and 255. The repetition is the first structure I find. Each block is a snapshot. The sequence of snapshots is time. Most values stay the same between snapshots. The

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69:11

“AI #156 Part 1: They Do Mean The Effect On Jobs” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/19

There was way too much going on this week to not split, so here we are. This first half contains all the usual first-half items, with a focus on projections of jobs and economic impacts and also timelines to the world being transformed with the associated risks of everyone dying.Quite a lot of Number Go Up, including Number Go Up A Lot Really Fast. Among the thing that this does not cover, that were important this week, we have the release of Claude Sonnet 4.6 (which is a big step over 4.5 at

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1:58

“You May Already Be Canadian” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/19

I learned a few weeks ago that I'm a Canadian citizen. This was pretty surprising to me, since I was born in the US to American parents, both of which had American parents. You don't normally suddenly become a citizen of another country! But with Bill C-3, anyone with any Canadian ancestry is now Canadian. [1] In my case my mother's, mother's, father's mother's mother was Canadian. While that is really quite far back, there isn't a generational limit anymore. Possibly you're also a

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13:33

“Building Technology to Drive AI Governance” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/19

Technically skilled people who care about AI going well often ask me: how should I spend my time if I think AI governance is important? By governance, I mean the constraints, incentives, and oversight that govern how AI is developed. One option is to focus on technical work that solves problems at the point of production, such as alignment research or safeguards. Another common instinct is to get directly involved in policy: switching to a policy role, funding advocacy, or lobbying policymakers

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4:03

“Managed vs Unmanaged Agency” by plex

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/18

(reply to Richard Ngo on the confused-ness of Instrumental vs Terminal goals that seemed maybe worth a quick top-level post based on @the gears to ascension saying this seemed like progress in personal comms) The structure Instrumental vs Terminal was pointing to seems better described as Managed vs Unmanaged Goal-Models. A cognitive process will often want to do things which it doesn't have the affordances to directly execute on given the circuits/parts/mental objects/etc it has available. When

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10:01

“Genomic emancipation contra eugenics” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/18

PDF version. berkeleygenomics.org.This is a linkpost for "Genomic emancipation contra eugenics"; a few of the initial sections are reproduced here. Section links may not work. Introduction Reprogenetics refers to biotechnological tools used to affect the genes of a future child. How can society develop and use reprogenetic technologies in a way that ends up going well? This essay investigates the history and nature of historical eugenic ideologies. I'll extract some lessons about how society

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16:12

“Why we should expect ruthless sociopath ASI” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/18

The conversation begins (Fictional) Optimist: So you expect future artificial superintelligence (ASI) “by default”, i.e. in the absence of yet-to-be-invented techniques, to be a ruthless sociopath, happy to lie, cheat, and steal, whenever doing so is selfishly beneficial, and with callous indifference to whether anyone (including its own programmers and users) lives or dies? Me: Yup! (Alas.) Optimist: …Despite all the evidence right in front of our eyes from humans and LLMs. Me: Yup! Optimist: OK,

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27:47

“Already Optimized” by Florian_Dietz

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/18

A Harry Potter fanfiction. Based on the world of "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" by Eliezer Yudkowsky, diverging from canon. Harry had been having, by any objective measure, an excellent week. On Monday he had demonstrated, to his own satisfaction and Professor Flitwick's visible alarm, that the Hover Charm could be generalized to any object regardless of mass if you conceptualized it as a momentum transfer rather than a force application. On Wednesday he had worked out why Neville's

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23:06

“Irrationality is Socially Strategic” by Valentine

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/18

It seems to me that the Hamming problem for developing a formidable art of rationality is, what to do about problems that systematically fight being solved. And in particular, how to handle bad reasoning that resists being corrected. I propose that each such stubborn problem is nearly always, in practice, part of a solution to some social problem. In other words, having the problem is socially strategic. If this conjecture is right, then rationality must include a process of finding solutions to

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4:59

“TV Detector Vans” by J Bostock

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/18

In the UK, you need a license to watch TV. The proceeds from the license fee fund the state broadcasting company, the BBC. In order to enforce this, the government sends out TV license inspectors, who go into unlicensed properties to check whether there's a TV present. Of course you don't actually have to let them in; they have no legal power! They are real. I had one visit once. He came in and asked what my TV was. I (truthfully) told him we watched Netflix and Youtube on it, and didn't own a TV

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11:40

“You’re an AI Expert – Not an Influencer” by Max Winga

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/18

Your hot takes are killing your credibility. Prior to my last year at ControlAI, I was a physicist working on technical AI safety research. Like many of those warning about the dangers of AI, I don’t come from a background in public communications, but I’ve quickly learned some important rules. The #1 rule that I’ve seen far too many others in this field break is that You’re an AI Expert - Not an Influencer. When communicating to an audience, your persona is one of two broad categories: Influencer

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7:04

″“We are confused about agency”” by Cole Wyeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/17

Epistemic status: Speculation on agent foundations research culture (which I am pretty deeply engaged with) and whether "we are confused about agency" which I am not sure about. I will take for granted that this is a common refrain, which should be familiar to anyone who is part of the relevant scene. The phrase "We are confused about agency," often with variations such as "way too," "deeply," or "dangerously" is a common membership signal for a certain AI safety research culture. Roughly

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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