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LessWrong posts by zvi

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23:30

“Childhood and Education #11: The Art of Learning” by...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/27

In honor of the latest (always deeply, deeply unpopular) attempts to destroy tracking and gifted and talented programs, and other attempts to get children to actually learn things, I thought it a good time to compile a number of related items.Table of Contents Lack Of Tracking Hurts Actual Everyone. Not Tracking Especially Hurts Those Who Are Struggling. No Child Left Behind Left Behind. Read Early, Read Often. Mirror, Mirror. Spaced Repetition. Learning Methods. Interruptions.

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77:43

“AI #122: Paying The Market Price” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/26

If you are Meta, and you want to attract top AI talent, you have a problem, because no one wants to work for you or on your products. So it is going to cost you. Mark Zuckerberg has decided he will pay what it takes to get at least some very good talent.If you are the rest of us, especially someone seeking an entry-level job and for whom $100 million signing bonuses are not flooding your inboxes, things are getting rougher. AI might not yet be destroyed a lot of jobs, but it is doing a number on

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23:35

“Love Island USA Season 7 Episode 20: What Could The...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/26

(Note: This is NOT being posted on my Substack or Wordpress, but I do want a record of it that is timestamped and accessible for various reasons, so I'm putting this here, but do not in any way feel like you need to read it unless it sounds like fun to you.) We all deserve some fun. This is some of mine. I will always be a gamer and a sports fan, and especially a game designer, at heart. The best game out there, the best sport out there is Love Island USA, and I’m getting the joy of experiencing it

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29:28

“Childhood and Education #10: Behaviors” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/23

Edition #9, that School is Hell, turned out to hit quite the nerve. Thus, I’m going to continue with the system of making the roundups have more focus in their themes, with this one being the opposite of school questions, except for the question of banning phones in schools which seemed to fit. Table of Contents Metal Health. Coercion. Game Theoretically Sound Discipline. The Joy of Doing Nothing. ADHD Exists But So Do Boys. Sports Go Sports. On the Big Screen. Kids Media Is Often

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77:50

“AI #121 Part 2: The OpenAI Files” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/20

You can find Part 1 here. This resumes the weekly, already in progress. The primary focus here is on the future, including policy and alignment, but also the other stuff typically in the back half like audio, and more near term issues like ChatGPT driving an increasing number of people crazy.If you haven’t been following the full OpenAI saga, the OpenAI Files will contain a lot of new information that you really should check out. If you’ve been following, some of it will likely still surprise

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76:07

“AI #121 Part 1: New Connections” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/19

That's right. I said Part 1. The acceleration continues.I do not intend to let this be a regular thing. I will (once again!) be raising the bar for what gets included going forward to prevent that. But for now, we’ve hit my soft limit, so I’m splitting things in two, mostly by traditional order but there are a few things, especially some videos, that I’m hoping to get to properly before tomorrow, and also I’m considering spinning out my coverage of The OpenAI Files. Tomorrow in Part 2 we’ll deal

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20:22

“Gemini 2.5 Pro: From 0506 to 0605” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/18

Google recently came out with Gemini-2.5-0605, to replace Gemini-2.5-0506, because I mean at this point it has to be the companies intentionally fucking with us, right?Google: Our updated Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview continues to excel at coding, helping you build more complex web apps. We’ve also added thinking budgets for more control over cost and latency. GA is coming in a couple of weeks… We’re excited about this latest model and its improved performance. Start building with our new preview as

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29:56

“o3 Turns Pro” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/17

You can now have o3 throw vastly more compute at a given problem. That's o3-pro.Should you have o3 throw vastly more compute at a given problem, if you are paying the $200/month subscription price for ChatGPT Pro? Should you pay the $200, or the order of magnitude markup over o3 to use o3-pro in the API? That's trickier. Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. My experience so far is that waiting a long time is annoying, sufficiently annoying that you often won’t want to wait. Whenever I ask o3-pro

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15:45

“RTFB: The RAISE Act” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/16

The RAISE Act has overwhelmingly passed the New York Assembly (95-1 among Democrats and 24-21 among Republicans) and New York Senate (37-1 among Democrats, 21-0 among Republicans). Governor Kathy Hochul now has to decide whether or not to sign it, which she has 10 non-Sunday days to do once the bill is delivered (30 if they’re out of session), but the bill might not be delivered for six months. The aim of this post, now that we are seeing increasing public discussion, is to go through the bill to

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92:53

“Monthly Roundup #31: June 2025” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/13

It's always a nice break to see what else is going on out there.Bad News Study finds sleep in male full-time workers falls as income rises, with one cause being other leisure activities substituting for sleep. It makes sense that sleep doesn’t cost money while other things often do, but the marginal cost of much leisure is very low. I don’t buy this as the cause. Perhaps reverse causation, those who need or prefer less sleep earn more money? The productivity statistics continue to be awful,

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102:48

“AI #120: While o3 Turned Pro” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/12

This week we got o3-Pro. As is my custom, I’m going to wait a bit so we can gather more information, especially this time since it runs so slowly. In some ways it's a cross between o3 and Deep Research, perhaps, but we shall see. Coverage to follow.Also released this week was Gemini 2.5 Pro 0605, to replace Gemini 2.5 Pro 0506, I swear these AI companies have to be fucking with us with the names at this point. I’ll also be covering that shortly, it does seem to be an upgrade. The other model

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23:17

“The Dream of a Gentle Singularity” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/11

Thanks For the MemosSam Altman offers us a new essay, The Gentle Singularity. It's short (if a little long to quote in full), so given you read my posts it's probably worth reading the whole thing. First off, thank you to Altman for publishing this and sharing his thoughts. This was helpful, and contained much that was good. It's important to say that first, before I start tearing into various passages, and pointing out the ways in which this is trying to convince us that everything is going to

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11:48

“Give Me a Reason(ing Model)” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/10

Are we doing this again? It looks like we are doing this again.This time it involves giving LLMs several ‘new’ tasks including effectively a Tower of Hanoi problem, asking them to specify the answer via individual steps rather than an algorithm then calling a failure to properly execute all the steps this way (whether or not they even had enough tokens to do it!) an inability to reason. The actual work in the paper seems by all accounts to be fine as far as it goes if presented accurately,

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36:28

“Dwarkesh Patel on Continual Learning” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/09

A key question going forward is the extent to which making further AI progress will depend upon some form of continual learning. Dwarkesh Patel offers us an extended essay considering these questions and reasons to be skeptical of the pace of progress for a while. I am less skeptical about many of these particular considerations, and do my best to explain why in detail. Separately, Ivanka Trump recently endorsed a paper with a discussion I liked a lot less but that needs to be discussed given how

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31:42

“DeepSeek-r1-0528 Did Not Have a Moment” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/06

When r1 was released in January 2025, there was a DeepSeek moment.When r1-0528 was released in May 2025, there was no moment. Very little talk. Here is a download link for DeepSeek-R1-0528-GGUF. It seems like a solid upgrade. If anything, I wonder if we are underreacting, and this illustrates how hard it is getting to evaluate which models are actually good. What this is not is the proper r2, nor do we have v4. I continue to think that will be a telltale moment. For now, what we have seems to

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116:42

“AI #119: Goodbye AISI?” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/05

AISI is being rebranded highly non-confusingly as CAISI. Is it the end of AISI and a huge disaster, or a tactical renaming to calm certain people down? Hard to tell. It could go either way. Sometimes you need to target the people who call things ‘big beautiful bill,’ and hey, the bill in question is indeed big. It contains multitudes.The AI world also contains multitudes. We got Cursor 1.0, time to get coding. On a personal note, this was the week of LessOnline, which was predictably great. I am

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102:31

“Dating Roundup #6” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/04

Previously: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5Dating Roundup #4 covered dating apps. Roundup #5 covered opening without them. Dating Roundup #6 covers everything else. Table of Contents You’re Single Because You Can’t Handle Basic Logistics. You’re Single Because You Don’t Ask Questions. You’re Single Because of Your Terrible Dating Tactics. You’re Single Because You Refuse to Play Your Role. You’re Single Because People Are Crazy About Age Gaps. You’re Single and You Need Professional Help.

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48:14

“In Which I Make the Mistake of Fully Covering an...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/06/03

I have been forced recently to cover many statements by US AI Czar David Sacks.Here I will do so again, for the third time in a month. I would much prefer to avoid this. In general, when people go on a binge of repeatedly making such inaccurate inflammatory statements, in such a combative way, I ignore. Alas, under the circumstances of his attacks on Anthropic, I felt an obligation to engage once more. The All-In Podcast did indeed go almost all-in (they left at least one chip behind) to go

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38:29

“Letting Kids Be Kids” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/05/30

Letting kids be kids seems more and more important to me over time. Our safetyism and paranoia about children is catastrophic on way more levels than most people realize. I believe all these effects are very large:It raises the time, money and experiential costs of having children so much that many choose not to have children, or to have less children than they would want. It hurts the lived experience of children. It hurts children's ability to grow and develop. It de facto

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111:53

“AI #118: Claude Ascendant” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/05/29

The big news of this week was of course the release of Claude 4 Opus. I offered two review posts: One on safety and alignment, and one on mundane utility, and a bonus fun post on Google's Veo 3. I am once again defaulting to Claude for most of my LLM needs, although I often will also check o3 and perhaps Gemini 2.5 Pro. On the safety and alignment front, Anthropic did extensive testing, and reported that testing in an exhaustive model card. A lot of people got very upset to learn that Opus could,

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