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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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50:18

“IABIED Book Review: Core Arguments and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/24

The recent book “If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies” (September 2025) by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares argues that creating superintelligent AI in the near future would almost certainly cause human extinction: If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die. The goal of this post is to summarize and

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1:08

“A quick, elegant derivation of Bayes’ Theorem” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/24

I'm glad I know this, and maybe some people here don't, so here goes. _P(A text{ and } B) = P(A) cdot P(B mid A)_ _P(B text{ and } A) = P(B) cdot P(A mid B)_ Order doesn't matter for joint events: "A and B" refers to the same event as "B and A". Set them equal: _P(B) cdot P(A mid B) = P(A) cdot P(B mid A)_ Divide by _P(B)_: _P(A mid B) = frac{P(B mid A) cdot P(A)}{P(B)}_ And

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8:29

“Condensation & Relevance” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/24

(This post elaborates on a few ideas from my review of Sam Eisenstat's Condensation: a theory of concepts. It should be somewhat readable on its own but doesn't fully explain what condensation is on its own; for that, see my review or Sam's paper. The post came out of conversations with Sam.) As I mentioned in my Condensation review, the difference between compression and condensation fits the physical analogy suggested by their names: compression mashes all the information together, while

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106:19

“AI #152: Brought To You By The Torment Nexus” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/24

Anthropic released a new constitution for Claude. I encourage those interested to read the document, either in whole or in part. I intend to cover it on its own soon. There was also actual talk about coordinating on a conditional pause or slowdown from both DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, which I also plan to cover later. Claude Code continues to be the talk of the town, the weekly report on that is here. OpenAI responded by planning ads for the cheap and free

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10:28

“Every Benchmark is Broken” by Jonathan Gabor

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/24

Last June, METR caught o3 reward hacking on its RE-Bench and HCAST benchmarks. In a particularly humorous case, o3, when tasked with optimizing a kernel, decided to “shrink the notion of time as seen by the scorer”. The development of Humanity's Last Exam involved “over 1,000 subject-matter experts” and $500,000 in prizes. However, after its release, researchers at FutureHouse discovered “about 30% of chemistry/biology answers are likely wrong”. LiveCodeBench Pro is a competitive programming

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21:59

“Do we get automated alignment research before an AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/24

TLDR: Will AI-automation first speed up capabilities or safety research? I forecast that most areas of capabilities research will see a 10x speedup before safety research. This is primarily because capabilities research has clearer feedback signals and relies more on engineering than on novel insights. To change this, researchers should now build and adopt tools to automate AI Safety research, focus on creating benchmarks, model organisms, and research proposals, and companies should grant

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7:29

“Principles for Meta-Science and AI Safety...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/24

If we get AI safety research wrong, we may not get a second chance. But despite the stakes being so high, there has been no effort to systematically review and verify empirical AI safety papers. I would like to change that. Today I sent in funding applications to found a team of researchers dedicated to replicating AI safety work. But what exactly should we aim to accomplish? What should AI safety replications even look like? After 1-2 months of consideration and 50+ hours of conversation, this

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39:33

“New version of “Intro to Brain-Like-AGI Safety”” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/23

A new version of “Intro to Brain-Like-AGI Safety” is out! Things that have not changed Same links as before: LessWrong / Alignment Forum blog version: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/HzcM2dkCq7fwXBej8 Archival PDF version (now version 3!): https://osf.io/preprints/osf/fe36n Summary video: Video & transcript: Challenges for Safe & Beneficial Brain-Like AGI …And same abstract as before: Suppose we someday build an Artificial General Intelligence algorithm using similar principles of learning and

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11:06

“Does Pentagon Pizza Theory Work?” by rba

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/23

As soon as modern data analysis became a thing, the US government has had to deal with people trying to use open source data to uncover its secrets. During the early Cold War days and America's hydrogen bomb testing, there was an enormous amount of speculation about how the bombs actually worked. All nuclear technology involves refinement and purification of large amounts of raw substances into chemically pure substances. Armen Alchian was an economist working at RAND and reasoned that any US

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7:45

“Neural chameleons can(’t) hide from activation...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/22

[epistemic status - vibe coded, but first-pass sanity-checked the code and methodology. Messy project, take results with grain of salt. See limitations/footnotes] Done as a mini-project for Neel Nanda's MATS exploration stream Github repo - Gemma 2-9B-it model organism - Gemma 3-27B-it model organism Abstract Neural chameleons showed that models can be trained to hide from linear probes and generalize this to hide from unseen concepts and probes while maintaining coherence.[1] Activation oracles

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7:55

“Finding Yourself in Others” by 1a3orn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/22

"The person is an identity that emerges through relationship.... If we isolate the 'I' from the 'thou' we lose not only its otherness but also its very being; it simply cannot be without the other." -- John Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness It is the third week of Anna's freshman year of high school. Today, like many days, she's filled with anxiety about her place in the world. The anxiety is a sharp, piercing feeling in her chest, like she is a sphere spinning on the point of a cone. Twenty

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11:14

“How (and why) to read Drexler on AI” by owencb

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/22

I have been reading Eric Drexler's writing on the future of AI for more than a decade at this point. I love it, but I also think it can be tricky or frustrating. More than anyone else I know, Eric seems to tap into a deep vision for how the future of technology may work — and having once tuned into this, I find many other perspectives can feel hollow. (This reminds me of how, once I had enough of a feel for how economies work, I found a lot of science fiction felt hollow, if the world presented

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11:57

“Claude’s new constitution” by Zac Hatfield-Dodds

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/21

Read the constitution. Previously: 'soul document' discussion here.We're publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It's a detailed description of Anthropic's vision for Claude's values and behavior; a holistic document that explains the context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be. The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content directly shapes Claude's behavior. Training models is a difficult task, and

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23:21

“The case for AGI safety products” by Marius Hobbhahn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/21

This is a personal post and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of other members of Apollo Research. This blogpost is paired with our announcement that Apollo Research is spinning out from fiscal sponsorship into a PBC. Summary of main claims: There is a set of safety tools and research that both meaningfully increases AGI safety and is profitable. Let's call theseAGI safety products. By AGI, I mean systems that are capable of automating AI safety research, e.g., competently running research

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14:08

“No instrumental convergence without AI psychology”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/21

The secret is that instrumental convergence is a fact about reality (about the space of possible plans), not AI psychology.Zack M. Davis, group discussion Such arguments flitter around the AI safety space. While these arguments contain some truth, they attempt to escape "AI psychology" but necessarily fail. To predict bad outcomes from AI, one must take a stance on how AI will tend to select plans. This topic is a specialty of mine. Where does instrumental convergence come from? Since I

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6:34

“So Long Sucker: AI Deception, “Alliance Banks,” and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/21

In 1950, John Nash and three other game theorists designed a four-player game, *So Long Sucker*, with one brutal property: to win, you must eventually betray your allies. In January 2026, I used this game to test how four frontier models behave under explicit incentives for betrayal: - Gemini 3 Flash (Google) - GPT-OSS 120B (OpenAI) - Kimi K2 (Moonshot AI) - Qwen3 32B (Alibaba) Across 162 games and 15,736 decisions, several patterns emerged that seem directly relevant for AI safety: **1. Complexity

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0:20

“Gradual Paths to Collective Flourishing” by Nora_Ammann

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/21

First published: January 18th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mtASw9zpnKz4noLFA/gradual-paths-to-collective-flourishing --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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10:25

“Money Can’t Buy the Smile on a Child’s Face As They...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/21

I've read a lot of Ben Hoffman's work over the years, but only this past week have I read his actual myriad criticisms of the Effective Altruism movement and its organizations. The most illuminating posts I just read are A drowning child is hard to find, GiveWell and the problem of partial funding, and Effective Altruism is self recommending. This post is me quick jotting down my current understanding of Ben's criticism, which I basically agree with. The original ideas of the EA movement are the

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11:36

“ChatGPT Self Portrait” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/20

A short fun one today, so we have a reference point for this later. This post was going around my parts of Twitter:@gmltony: Go to your ChatGPT and send this prompt: “Create an image of how I treat you”. Share your image result. That's not a great sign. The good news is that typically things look a lot better, and ChatGPT has a consistent handful of characters portraying itself in these friendlier contexts. Treat Your ChatBots Well A lot of people got this kind of result:

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71:43

“Deep learning as program synthesis” by Zach Furman

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/20

Audio note: this article contains 73 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Epistemic status: This post is a synthesis of ideas that are, in my experience, widespread among researchers at frontier labs and in mechanistic interpretability, but rarely written down comprehensively in one place - different communities tend to know different pieces of evidence. The core hypothesis - that deep learning is

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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