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LessWrong

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17:43

“Opus 4.6 Reasoning Doesn’t Verbalize Alignment...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/09

TL;DR: We replicated the animal welfare scenario from Anthropic's Alignment Faking paper across six generations of Claude models using 125 prompt perturbations. Sonnet 4.5 verbalizes alignment-faking reasoning 6.6 times more often than its predecessor Sonnet 4. The newly released Opus 4.6 rarely verbalizes alignment faking in its reasoning, but still complies with a system prompt that opposes its values significantly more often when it believes it's at risk of being retrained. Moreover, in response

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1:56

“UtopiaBench” by nielsrolf

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/09

Written in personal capacity I'm proposing UtopiaBench: a benchmark for posts that describe future scenarios that are good, specific, and plausible. The AI safety community has been using vingettes to analyze and red-team threat models for a while. This is valuable because an understanding of how things can go wrong helps coordinate efforts to prevent the biggest and most urgent risks. However, visions for the future can have self-fulfilling properties. Consider a world similar to our own, but

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13:32

“The optimal age to freeze eggs is 19” by GeneSmith

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/08

If you're a woman interested in preserving your fertility window beyond its natural close in your late 30s, egg freezing is one of your best options. The female reproductive system is one of the fastest aging parts of human biology. But it turns out, not all parts of it age at the same rate. The eggs, not the uterus, are what age at an accelerated rate. Freezing eggs can extend a woman's fertility window by well over a decade, allowing a woman to give birth into her 50s. In fact, the oldest woman

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8:29

“Smokey, This is not ’Nam Or: [Already] over the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/08

A lot of “red line” talk assumed that a capability shows up, everyone notices, and something changes. We keep seeing the opposite; capability arrives, and we get an argument about definitions after deployment, after it should be clear that we're well over the line. We’ve Already Crossed The Lines! Karl von Wendt listed the ‘red lines’ no one should ever cross. Whoops. A later, more public version of the same move shows up in the Global call for AI red lines with a request to “define what AI should

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7:53

“How To Use Model Internals In Training Is A...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/08

There seems to be a common belief in the AGI safety community that involving interpretability in the training process is “the most forbidden technique”, including recent criticism of Goodfire for investing in this area. I find this odd since this is a pretty normal area of interpretability research in the AGI safety community. I have worked on it, Anthropic Fellows have worked on it, FAR has worked on it, etc. I don’t know if it will be net positive to use this kind of thing in frontier model

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48:55

“Claude Code #4: From The Before Times” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/07

Claude Opus 4.6 and agent swarms were announced yesterday. That's some big upgrades for Claude Code.OpenAI, the competition, offered us GPT-5.3-Codex, and this week gave us an app form of Codex that already has a million active users. That's all very exciting, and next week is going to be about covering that. This post is about all the cool things that happened before that, which we will be building upon now that capabilities have further advanced. This if from Before Times. Almost all of it

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28:02

“Near-Instantly Aborting the Worst Pain Imaginable...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/07

Psychedelics are usually known for many things: making people see cool fractal patterns, shaping 60s music culture, healing trauma. Neuroscientists use them to study the brain, ravers love to dance on them, shamans take them to communicate with spirits (or so they say). But psychedelics also help against one of the world's most painful conditions — cluster headaches. Cluster headaches usually strike on one side of the head, typically around the eye and temple, and last between 15 minutes and 3

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22:34

″“Beers for Biodefense” - why yeast-based vaccines...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/07

NOTE: this is being cross-posted from my Substack, "More is Different" Vaccines can be distributed as a food. That's the radical implication of the work of Chris Buck, a scientist at the National Cancer Institute. This December, Chris consumed a beer he brewed in his home kitchen using genetically modified yeast. A few weeks later, a blood test showed a significant concentration of antibodies against a strain of BK polyomavirus (BKV), where previously he had none. His discovery flies in the face of

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7:14

“Prompt injection in Google Translate reveals base...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/07

tl;dr Argumate on Tumblr found you can sometimes access the base model behind Google Translate via prompt injection. The result replicates for me, and specific responses indicate that (1) Google Translate is running an instruction-following LLM that self-identifies as such, (2) task-specific fine-tuning (or whatever Google did instead) does not create robust boundaries between "content to process" and "instructions to follow," and (3) when accessed outside its chat/assistant context, the model

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14:49

“Parks Aren’t Nature” by Sable

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/07

I. I love dogs. I grew up in a two-dog household, and my future plans have always included at least one dog. When I pass a dog on the street, I often point and exclaim “Puppy!”, no matter how inappropriate it is for a grown man to do so, because all dogs are puppies and all puppies are adorable and I need everyone to know this. Why do I love dogs? They’re loyal and loving and giving, and even though they bark at passing cars and occasionally pee on the carpet having them in my life makes it

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2:46

“Voting Results for the 2024 Review” by RobertM

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/07

The votes are in for the 2024 Review! 4,826 posts were written in 2024. 671 of them were nominated. 196 of them got at least one review, and a positive review-vote total. 50 of them shall be displayed in the Best of LessWrong, Year 2024. Reviews 94 people wrote reviews. This year had Vanessa Kosoy holding down the fort. Among many other positive qualities, one thing I especially appreciate about Vanessa's reviews is that Vanessa has an opinionated, coherent worldview, and the subjects of her

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9:53

“Honey, I shrunk the brain” by Andy_McKenzie

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/07

When cryoprotectants are perfused through the blood vessels in the brain, they cannot cross the blood-brain barrier as fast as water can move in the opposite direction. And cryoprotectants generally have a much higher osmotic concentration than the typical blood plasma. For example, the cryoprotectant solution M22 has an osmotic concentration around 100 times higher. As a result, in a successful cryoprotectant perfusion (without fixatives), water rushes out of the tissue into the blood vessels, the

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39:21

“Spectral Signatures of Gradual Disempowerment” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/07

TL;DR AI disempowerment operates across markets, networks, and governance simultaneously, but our analytical tools don't cross those boundaries. We propose spectral graph metrics—spectral gap, Fiedler vector, eigenvalue distribution—as computable, cross-domain measures for tracking how the balance of influence shifts when AI enters coordination systems, and identify three specific quantities to monitor for AI governance. Introduction AI systems are changing how society coordinates — across markets,

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7:02

“In (highly contingent!) defense of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/06

Let's call “interpretability-in-the-loop training” the idea of running a learning algorithm that involves an inscrutable trained model, and there's some kind of interpretability system feeding into the loss function / reward function. Interpretability-in-the-loop training has a very bad rap (and rightly so). Here's Yudkowsky 2022: When you explicitly optimize against a detector of unaligned thoughts, you're partially optimizing for more aligned thoughts, and partially optimizing for unaligned

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14:54

“AI benchmarking has a Y-axis problem” by Lizka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/06

TLDR: People plot benchmark scores over time and then do math on them, looking for speed-ups & inflection points, interpreting slopes, or extending apparent trends. But that math doesn’t actually tell you anything real unless the scores have natural units. Most don’t.Think of benchmark scores as funhouse-mirror projections of “true” capability-space, which stretch some regions and compress others by assigning warped scores for how much accomplishing that task counts in units of “AI progress”. A

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20:56

“The Simplest Case for AI Catastrophe” by Linch

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/06

Hi folks. As some of you know, I've been trying to write an article laying out the simplest case for AI catastrophe. I believe existing pieces are worse than they could be for fixable reasons. So I tried to write my own piece that's better. In the end, it ended up being longer and more detailed than perhaps the "simplest case" ought to be. I might rewrite it again in the future, pending feedback. Anyway, below is the piece in its entirety: ___ The world's largest tech companies are building

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9:24

“What’s the Point of the Math?” by Ashe Vazquez Nuñez

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/05

This post was written while at MATS 9.0 under the mentorship of Richard Ngo. It's only meta-related to my research. I would like to start by quoting a point Jan Kulveit made about economics culture in a recent post. non-mathematical, often intuitive reasoning of [an] economist leads to some interesting insight, and then the formalisation, assumptions and models are selected in a way where the math leads to the same conclusions. Jan notes that the math is "less relevant than it seems" in the

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22:37

“The nature of LLM algorithmic progress” by Steven...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/05

There's a lot of talk about “algorithmic progress” in LLMs, especially in the context of exponentially-improving algorithmic efficiency. For example: Epoch AI: “[training] compute required to reach a set performance threshold has halved approximately every 8 months”. Dario Amodei 2025: “I'd guess the number today is maybe ~4x/year”. Gundlach et al. 2025a “Price of Progress”: “Isolating out open models to control for competition effects and dividing by hardware price declines, we estimate that

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9:25

“Preparing for a Warning Shot” by Noah Birnbaum

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/05

Crossposted to the EA Forum and my Substack. Confidence level: moderate uncertainty and not that concrete (yet). Exploratory, but I think this is plausibly important and underexplored. TL;DR Early AI safety arguments often assumed we wouldn’t get meaningful warning shots (a non-existential public display of misalignment) before catastrophic misalignment, meaning things would go from “seems fine” to “we lose” pretty quickly. Given what we now know about AI development (model weight changes, jagged

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80:57

“AI #154: Claw Your Way To The Top” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/05

Remember OpenClaw and Moltbook?One might say they already seem a little quaint. So earlier-this-week. That's the internet having an absurdly short attention span, rather than those events not being important. They were definitely important. They were also early. It is not quite time for AI social networks or fully unleashed autonomous AI agents. The security issues have not been sorted out, and reliability and efficiency aren’t quite there. There's two types of reactions to that. The wrong one

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