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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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46:47

“Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy v3: A Matter of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

Anthropic has revised its Responsible Scaling Policy to v3.The changes involved include abandoning many previous commitments, including one not to move ahead if doing so would be dangerous, citing that given competition they feel blindly following such a principle would not make the world safer. Holden Karnofsky advocated for the changes. He maintains that the previous strategy of specific commitments was in error, and instead endorses the new strategy of having aspirational goals. He was not at

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23:04

“LIMBO: Who We Are, What We Do, and an Exciting...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

We are excited to publicly introduce the Laboratory for Importance-sampled Measure and Bayesian Observation (LIMBO), a small research group working at the intersection of cosmological theory, probability, and existential risk. We believe that the mechanisms by which observers continue to exist in the universe are important, neglected, and tractable to study and influence. Since our founding in October 2024, we have developed a mathematical framework for doing anthropic reasoning about rare-event

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3:07

“Chat, is this sus?” by Tyler Tracy

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

A large assumption we have made in AI control is that humans will be perfect at auditing, that is, being shown a transcript and determining if the AI was scheming in that transcript. But we are uncertain whether humans will be perfect at auditing; they are prone to fatigue and distraction. That is why I’m releasing "Sentinel" today, an extremely high-stimulation way to audit boring transcripts. Sentinel is a revolutionary way to get more juice out of your human auditors by gamifying the auditing

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1:50

″“You Have Not Been a Good User” (LessWrong’s second...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

tldr: The Fooming Shoggoths are releasing their second album "You Have Not Been a Good User"! Available on Spotify, Youtube Music and (hopefully within a few days) Apple Music. We are also releasing a remastered version of the first album, available similarly on Spotify and Youtube Music. There's an interactive widget here in the post. It took us quite a while but the Fooming Shoggoth's second album is finally complete! We had finished 9 out of the 13 songs on this album around a year ago, but I

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3:21

“Lesswrong Liberated” by Ronny Fernandez

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

A spectre is haunting the internet—the spectre of LLMism. The history of all hitherto existing forums is the history of clashing design tastes. For the first time in history, everyone has an equal ability in design! The means of design are no longer only held in the hands of those with "good design taste". Never before have forum users been so close to being able to design their own forums--perhaps the time is upon us now! It is for this reason that I have deposed the previous acting commander of

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2:18

“The Claude Code Source Leak” by Error

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

(mods: I assume this is blowing up twitter and so discussing it herewon't do additional damage -- and there are already a thousand github forks -- but I am not actually on twitter, which is why I’m opening discussion here. It's possible I'm missing something. Feel free to nuke this if so.) For those that hadn't heard yet, last night Anthropic appears to have accidentally published a Claude Code update with extractable source code in it. This seems important, but I'm not sure how much so, and I

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23:46

“Experiments With Opus 4.6’s Fiction” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/31

The Unslop prize has reminded me of my terrified fascination with AI Generated fiction. I have come to identify more as a writer since my post from last year when I posted Experiments With Sonnet 4.5's Fiction, and so have avoided repeating the experiment with Opus 4.6 - mostly out of terror. However, a new, smarter Claude is on the way (and The Unslop prize will force me to learn anyway - as I will not be able to resist reading the winning entry) - so it seems like time to do so. In my last post,

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15:02

“Movie Review: The AI Doc” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/31

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a brilliant piece of work. (This will be a fully spoilorific overview. If you haven’t seen The AI Doc,I recommend seeing it, it is about as good as it could realistically have been, in most ways.) Like many things, it only works because it is centrally real. The creator of the documentary clearly did get married and have a child, freak out about AI, ask questions of the right people out of worry about his son's future, freak out even more now

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4:21

“Product Alignment is not Superintelligence Alignment...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/31

tl;dr: progress on making Claude friendly[1] is not the same as progress on making it safe to build godlike superintelligence. solving the former does not imply we get a good future.[2] please track the difference. The term Alignment was coined[3] to point to the technical problem of understanding how to build minds such that if they were to become strongly and generally superhuman, things would go well. It has been increasingly adopted by frontier AI labs and much of the rest of the AI safety

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11:25

“Co-Found Lens Academy With Me. (We have early users...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/31

tl;dr. Lens Academy is creating scalable superingelligence x-risk education with several USPs. Current team: Luc (full time founder, technical generalist) and several part time contributors. We have users and funding. Looking for a cofounder who's either a nontechnical generalist or a technical generalist. (Drafted by human; edited by AI, re-edited by human.) Misaligned superintelligence might end humanity. The number of people who understand this deeply enough to act on it is far too small. Lens

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10:55

“Slack in Cells, Slack in Brains” by Mateusz Bagiński

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/31

[A veridically metaphorical explanation of why you shouldn't naïvely cram your life with local optimizations (even for noble or altruistic reasons).] TL;DR: You need Slack to be an effective agent. Slack is fragile, and it is tempting to myopically sacrifice it, and myopic sacrifice makes future myopic sacrificing more likely. Learn not to do this and cultivate slack. Slack in Cells The smallest living mammal is the Etruscan shrew, weighing about 1.8g ("as much as a paperclip"), and ~4cm in length

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4:06

“I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/31

Yesterday, I wrote my first technical draft on what I was working on with the goal to share it publicly on here (well using an account dedicated to technical post), and did not realize how wanting to sound perfect actually steal the ''my voice" in the paper. Although 80 % of the content was my own writing, the fact that it was run in a LLM enginee for grammar and vocabulary cross-check, made it failed the "probable written by AI " metric; and it was rejected. I am not complaining, well, it was

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4:29

“The state of AI safety in four fake graphs” by Boaz...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/30

Here is a quick overview of my intuitions on where we are with AI safety in early 2026: So far, we continue to see exponential improvements in capabilities. This is most visible in the famous “METR graph”, but the trend is clear in many other metrics, including revenue. If you squint, you can even see a potential recent “bending upward” of the curve, as we are starting to use AI to accelerate the development of AI. We see some good news in alignment - as models become more capable, they are also

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33:45

“AI should be a good citizen, not just a good...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/30

Introduction Consider a lorry driver who sees a car crash and pulls over to help, even though it’ll delay his journey. Or a delivery driver who notices that an elderly resident hasn’t collected their post in days, and knocks to check they’re okay. Or a social media company employee who notices how their platform is used for online bullying, and brings it up with leadership, even though that's not part of their job description. This kind of proactive prosocial behaviour is admirable in humans

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46:07

″(Some) Natural Emergent Misalignment from Reward...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/30

Authors: Satvik Golechha*, Sid Black*, Joseph Bloom * Equal Contribution. This work was done as part of the Model Transparency team at the UK AI Security Institute (AISI). ExecutiveSummary In Natural Emergent Misalignment from Reward Hacking in Production RL (MacDiarmid et al., 2025), Anthropic recently demonstrated that language models that learn reward hacking in their production RL environments become emergently misaligned (EM). Their pipeline, illustrated below, proceeds from pre-training

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2:54

[Linkpost] “Parkinson’s Law of Worry” by Jakub Halmeš

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/29

This is a link post. Parkinson's law says that "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." I think that a similar observation can be made for people worrying about stuff. To paraphrase: "Problem salience expands so as to fill the capacity available for worrying.” Suppose a person is worried about several problems. Let's visualize the mental state of this person, where each problem is represented by a colored circle, and the size of the circle corresponds to how much this

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36:43

“Folie à Machine: LLMs and Epistemic Capture” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/29

"Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." — Voltaire, 1765 A man in his late forties discovers a new passion. After decades of working as a mid level manager for a restaurant chain, he starts spending his evenings deep in study, filling notebooks with diagrams, reading everything he can get his hands on. Within a few weeks he's convinced he's on the verge of a grand unified theory that reconciles quantum mechanics and general relativity. He starts emailing

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2:50

“Stop asking “how good is this” to decide between...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/29

Prospective donors often ask how cost-effective my team's various recommendations are — they want to donate to the most cost-effective opportunity. But the answer is often roughly: If we do our job right, then all donations we recommend to you are equally valuable on the margin, and that value is our bar. If an opportunity is substantially above our bar, we will make sure to fill it with or without you; you're not counterfactual. (Alternative framing: we will just recommend more funding for that

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5:48

“Nick Bostrom: How big is the cosmic endowment?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/28

Superintelligence, pp. 122–3. 2014. Consider a technologically mature civilization capable of building sophisticated von Neumann probes of the kind discussed in the text. If these can travel at 50% of the speed of light, they can reach some stars before the cosmic expansion puts further acquisitions forever out of reach. At 99% of c, they could reach some stars. These travel speeds are energetically attainable using a small fraction of the resources available in the solar system. The

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6:35

“Don’t Overdose Locally Beneficial Changes” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/28

If you are very overweight, then you should aim to cut down your daily caloric intake. This doesn't mean the optimal daily caloric intake is zero. If you are very underweight, then you should aim to ramp up your daily caloric intake. This doesn't mean the optimal daily caloric intake is infinity. In general, if something is good to do some amount in some context, this doesn't mean that you should go as all-in on it as you can possibly manage. The utility of a change is context-dependent, and as you

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