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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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8:41

“Most Algorithmic Progress is Data Progress...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/10

So this post brought to you by Beren today is about how a lot of claims about within-paradigm algorithmic progress is actually mostly about just getting better data, leading to a Flynn effect, and the reason I'm mentioning this is because once we have to actually build new fabs and we run out of data in 2028-2031, progress will be slower than people expect (assuming we havent reached AGI by then). When forecasting AI progress, the forecasters and modellers often break AI progress down into two

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4:55

“The funding conversation we left unfinished” by jenn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/10

People working in the AI industry are making stupid amounts of money, and word on the street is that Anthropic is going to have some sort of liquidity event soon (for example possibly IPOing sometime next year). A lot of people working in AI are familiar with EA, and are intending to direct donations our way (if they haven't started already). People are starting to discuss what this might mean for their own personal donations and for the ecosystem, and this is encouraging to see. It also has me

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14:11

“Human Dignity: a review” by owencb

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/10

I have in my possession a short document purporting to be a manifesto from the future. That's obviously absurd, but never mind that. It covers some interesting ground, and the second half is pretty punchy. Let's discuss it. Principles for Human Dignity in the Age of AI Humanity is approaching a threshold. The development of artificial intelligence promises extraordinary abundance — the end of material poverty, liberation from disease, tools that amplify human potential beyond current imagination

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17:42

“Insights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/10

Credit: Nano Banana, with some text provided. You may be surprised to learn that ClaudePlaysPokemon is still running today, and that Claude still hasn't beaten Pokémon Red, more than half a year after Google proudly announced that Gemini 2.5 Pro beat Pokémon Blue. Indeed, since then, Google and OpenAI models have gone on to beat the longer and more complex Pokémon Crystal, yet Claude has made no real progress on Red since Claude 3.7 Sonnet![1] This is because ClaudePlaysPokemon is a purer test of

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11:11

“My experience running a 100k” by Alexandre Variengien

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/09

TheSVP100route. On the 3rd of August last year, I woke up early. I stood nervously with a hundred other runners in a hall in the city of Newmarket, near Cambridge in the UK. I felt intimidated as I looked at the calves, the size of champagne bottles, of the other participants. Only a few runners were starting their first 100k that morning. For many, this was not even the peak of their season. This route was long but almost flat, with only 1,000 meters of cumulative elevation. The real ultras were

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22:50

“[paper] Auditing Games for Sandbagging” by Jordan...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/09

Jordan Taylor, Sid Black, Dillon Bowen, Thomas Read, Satvik Golechha, Alex Zelenka-Martin, Oliver Makins, Connor Kissane, Kola Ayonrinde, Jacob Merizian, Samuel Marks, Chris Cundy, Joseph Bloom UK AI Security Institute, FAR.AI, Anthropic Links: Paper | Code | Models | Transcripts | Interactive Demo Epistemic Status: We're sharing our paper and a hastily written summary of it, assuming a higher level of context on sandbagging / auditing games than other materials. We also share some informal

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13:38

“Towards Categorization of Adlerian Excuses” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/09

[Author's note: LLMs were used to generate and sort examples into their requisite categories, as well as find and summarize relevant papers, and extensive assistance with editing] Context: Alfred Adler (1870–1937) split from Freud by asserting that human psychology is teleological (goal-oriented) rather than causal (drive-based). He argued that neuroses and "excuses" are not passive symptoms of past trauma, but active, creative tools used by the psyche to safeguard self-esteem. This post attempts

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15:16

“Every point of intervention” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/09

Crosspost from my blog. Events are already set for catastrophe, they must be steered along some course they would not naturally go. [...] Are you confident in the success of this plan? No, that is the wrong question, we are not limited to a single plan. Are you certain that this plan will be enough, that we need essay no others? Asked in such fashion, the question answers itself. The path leading to disaster must be averted along every possible point of intervention. — Professor Quirrell

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6:50

“How Stealth Works” by Linch

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/09

Stealth technology is cool. It's what gave the US domination over the skies during the latter half of the Cold War, and the biggest component of the US's information dominance in both war and peace, at least prior to the rise of global internet connectivity and cybersecurity. Yet the core idea is almost embarrassingly simple. So how does stealth work? Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash When we talk about stealth, we’re usually talking about evading radar. How does radar work? Radar antennas emit

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6:45

“Reward Function Design: a starter pack” by Steven...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/08

In the companion post We need a field of Reward Function Design, I implore researchers to think about what RL reward functions (if any) will lead to RL agents that are not ruthless power-seeking consequentialists. And I further suggested that human social instincts constitutes an intriguing example we should study, since they seem to be an existence proof that such reward functions exist. So what is the general principle of Reward Function Design that underlies the non-ruthless (“ruthful”??)

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10:16

“We need a field of Reward Function Design” by Steven...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/08

(Brief pitch for a general audience, based on a 5-minute talk I gave.) Let's talk about Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents as a possible path to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) My research focuses on “RL agents”, broadly construed. These were big in the 2010s—they made the news for learning to play Atari games, and Go, at superhuman level. Then LLMs came along in the 2020s, and everyone kinda forgot that RL agents existed. But I’m part of a small group of researchers who still thinks that the

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2:18

“2025 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/08

The Less Wrong General Census is unofficially here! You can take it at this link. The kinda-sorta-annual-if-you-really-squint tradition of the Less Wrong Census is once more upon us! I want to pitch you on taking the survey. First, the demographics data is our best view into who's using the site and who is in the community. I use it when trying to figure out how to help meetups, I add a bunch of questions the LessWrong team asks which I assume they use to improve the site. Second, because I am

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3:30

“I said hello and greeted 1,000 people at 5am this...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/08

At the ass crack of dawn, in the dark and foggy mist, thousands of people converged on my location, some wearing short shorts, others wearing an elf costume and green tights. I was volunteering at a marathon. The race director told me the day before, “these people have trained for the last 6-12 months for this moment. They’ll be waking up at 3am. For many of them, this is the first marathon they’ve ever run. When they get off the bus at 5am, in the freezing cold, you’ll be the first face they see

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46:33

“AI in 2025: gestalt” by technicalities

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/07

This is the editorial for this year's "Shallow Review of AI Safety". (It got long enough to stand alone.) Epistemic status: subjective impressions plus one new graph plus 300 links. Huge thanks to Jaeho Lee, Jaime Sevilla, and Lexin Zhou for running lots of tests pro bono and so greatly improving the main analysis. tl;dr Informed people disagree about the prospects for LLM AGI – or even just what exactly was achieved this year. But the famous ones with a book to talk at least agree that we’re2-20

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16:14

“Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity” by Eliezer...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/07

"How are you coping with the end of the world?" journalists sometimes ask me, and the true answer is something they have no hope of understanding and I have no hope of explaining in 30 seconds, so I usually answer something like, "By having a great distaste for drama, and remembering that it's not about me." The journalists don't understand that either, but at least I haven't wasted much time along the way. Actual LessWrong readers sometimes ask me how I deal emotionally with the end of the world

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10:18

“Answering a child’s questions” by Alex_Altair

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/06

I recently had a conversation with a friend of a friend who has a very curious child around 5 years of age. I offered to answers some of their questions, since I love helping people understand the world. They sent me eight questions, and I answered them by hand-written letter. I figured I'd also post my answers here, since it was both a fun exploration of the object-level questions, and a really interesting exercise in epistemics. Thank you for your questions! I find that asking questions about the

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28:14

“The corrigibility basin of attraction is a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/06

The idea of a “basin of attraction around corrigibility” motivates much of prosaic alignment research. Essentially this is an abstract way of thinking about the process of iteration on AGI designs. Engineers test to find problems, then understand the problems, then design fixes. The reason we need corrigibility for this is that a non-corrigible agent generally has incentives to interfere with this process. The concept was introduced by Paul Christiano: ... a corrigible agent prefers to build other

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12:25

“why america can’t build ships” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/06

the Constellation-class frigateLast month, the US Navy's Constellation-class frigate program was canceled. The US Navy has repeatedly failed at making new ship classes (see the Zumwalt, DDG(X), and LCS programs) so the Constellation-class was supposed to use an existing design, the FREMM frigate used by Italy, France, and Egypt. However... once the complex design work commenced, the Navy and Marinette had to make vast changes to the design in order to meet stricter U.S. survivability

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3:24

“Help us find founders for new AI safety projects” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/06

In the past 10 years, Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) has funded dozens of projects doing important work related to AI safety / navigating transformative AI. And yet, perhaps most activities that would improve expected outcomes from transformative AI have no significant project pushing them forward, let alone multiple. This is mainly because we and other funders in the space don't receive promising applications for most desirable activities, and so massive gaps in the ecosystem

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4:21

“Critical Meditation Theory” by lsusr

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/06

[Terminology note: "samatha", "jhana", "insight", "homunculus" and "non-local time" are technical jargon defined in Rationalist Cyberbuddhist Jargon 1.0]To understand how meditation affects the brain, it is necessary to understand criticality. Criticality comes from the mathematical study of dynamical systems. Dynamical systems are systems in which a point moves through space. Dynamical systems can be described on a continuum with ordered on one end and disordered on the other end. An ordered

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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