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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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5:42

“Stanley Milgram wasn’t pessimistic enough about...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/28

A landmark of social psychology research was “The Milgram Experiment,” but a new look at the audio tapes and other evidence collected during that experiment suggests that we may have been interpreting it incorrectly. Here is the Wikipedia summary of the experiment, showing how it is typically portrayed: Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram… intended to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their

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4:55

[Linkpost] “What if superintelligence is just weak?”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/28

This is a link post. In response to “2023 Or, Why I am Not a Doomer” by Dean W. Ball. Dean Ball is a pretty big voice in AI policy – over 19k subscribers on his newsletter, and a former Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the Trump White House – so why does he disagree that AI poses an existential danger to humanity? In short, he holds the common view that superintelligence (ASI) simply won’t be that powerful. I strongly disagree, and I think he makes a couple of invalid leaps to arrive there. Better

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9:57

“Pray for Casanova” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/28

I am fascinated by the beautiful who become deformed. Some become bitter, more bitter than those born less pulchritudinous. Most learn to cope with the loss. Some were blind to how much their beauty helped them, the halo of their hotness an invisible bumper softening life. But most cultivated this aspect to some degree. They knew what was up. But none were fully prepared for the anti-halo: the revulsion, the active disgust. They became monsters. This is what it means to be marred. In 1715 England,

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8:35

“ControlAI 2025 Impact Report” by Andrea_Miotti, Alex...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/27

This post highlights a few key excerpts from our full impact report. You can read the full report at https://controlai.com/impact-report-2025. ControlAI is a non-profit organization working to avert the extinction risks posed by superintelligence. We help hundreds of thousands of people understand these risks and meet hundreds of lawmakers to inform them, without mincing words, about what is at stake. In little more than a year, we briefed over 200 parliamentarians, built a coalition of 110+ UK

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17:21

“AI’s capability improvements haven’t come from it...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/27

METR's frontier time horizons are doubling every few months, providing substantial evidence that AI will soon be able to automate many tasks or even jobs. But per-task inference costs have also risen sharply, and automation requires AI labor to be affordable, not just possible.[1] Many people look at the rising compute bills behind frontier models and conclude that automation will soon become unaffordable. I think this misreads the data. The rise in inference cost reflects models completing longer

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5:57

“Scaffolded Reproducers, Scaffolded Agents” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/27

[Experimenting with transposing a concept coined in one domain to another domain, perhaps not completely legibly to the entire intended audience.] In Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Peter Godfrey-Smith introduces a bunch of useful concepts allowing us to think more clearly about evolution and its constitutive processes. One of those is the distinction between three types of reproducers: collective, simple, and scaffolded (introduced in chapter 5.1). The short explanation of those

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16:56

“My hobby: running deranged surveys” by leogao

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/27

In late 2024, I was on a long walk with some friends along the coast of the San Francisco Bay when the question arose of just how much of a bubble we live in. It's well known that the Bay Area is a bubble, and that normal people don’t spend that much time thinking about things like AGI. But there was still some disagreement on just how strong that bubble is. I made a spicy claim: even at NeurIPS, the biggest gathering of AI researchers in the world, half the people wouldn’t know what AGI is. As

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51:05

“The Terrarium” by Caleb Biddulph

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/26

System: You are an AI agent in the Terrarium, a self-contained “society” of AI agents. The purpose of the Terrarium is to solve open mathematical problems for the benefit of humanity. You are running on the Orpheus-5.7 language model. Your agent ID is 79,265. The current epoch is 549 (a new epoch begins every 30 minutes). New problems are posted each epoch; query /problems for the current list. Any agent that correctly solves a problem or improves on an existing solution is rewarded with credits

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1:25

“Sen. Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/26

The text of the bill can be found here. It begins by citing the warnings of AI company CEOs and deep learning pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, as well as the 2023 FLI open letter calling for a 6-month pause. The bill would prohibits the construction or upgrading of AI datacenters until Congress pass an AI safety law aimed at preventing AI companies "from releasing harmful products into the world that threaten the health and well-being of working families, our privacy and civil rights,

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42:02

“Test your best methods on our hard CoT interp tasks”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/26

Authors: Daria Ivanova, Riya Tyagi, Arthur Conmy, Neel Nanda Daria and Riya are co-first authors. This work was done during Neel Nanda's MATS 9.0. Claude helped write code and suggest edits for this post. TL;DR One of our best safety techniques right now is “just read the chain of thought”. But this isn’t always enough: can we learn more by going beyond just reading the reasoning? Yet it's such an effective technique that it's hard to tell if we have made much progress on improving methods. To

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11:43

″“What Exactly Would An International AI Treaty Say?”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/26

I’ve heard a number of people say that it's unclear what the technical contours of a global AI treaty would look like. That is true - but it's not actually an obstacle to negotiating an international treaty. I’ll try to explain why this isn’t a good objection, but the short version is that if countries have clear goals which are largely shared, treaty, and negotiations end up with strong treaties. So the important questions are not the exact rules, but if there really is a joint global risk that

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18:04

“Socrates is Mortal” by Benquo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/26

Socrates is Mortal There is a scene in Plato that contains, in miniature, the catastrophe of Athenian public life. Two men meet at a courthouse. One is there to prosecute his own father for the death of a slave. The other is there to be indicted for indecency. [1] The prosecutor, Euthyphro, is certain he understands what decency requires. The accused, Socrates, is not certain of anything, and says so. They talk. Euthyphro's confidence is striking. His own family thinks it is indecent for a son

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20:57

“Agents Can Get Stuck in Self-distrusting Equilibria”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/26

Or: Identities as Schelling Fences for Embedded Agents This post was written as part of research done at MATS 9.0 under the mentorship of Richard Ngo. He contributed significantly to the ideas discussed within. Introduction This post questions the sanctity of the "agent" and discusses how Temporal Instances (TIs) of an agent can enter conflict due to distrust. These dynamics are describable mathematically as an intrapersonal cooperative game. I define a time-version of Nash equilibria and show an

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2:03

“Label By Usable Volume” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/26

I always look at unit prices: how much do I get for my dollar? But that assumes I can use all of it. The manufacturer gets "12oz" whether I'll be able to get the full 12oz or only 6oz. L'Oreal was selling lotions where: these Liquid Cosmetic Product containers only dispense between as little as 43 percent to 81 percent of the container's advertised contents. — Critcher et al. v. L'Oreal Even though these containers would often dispense less than half of the advertised volume, L'Oreal

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25:25

“Past Automation Replaced Jobs. AI Will Replace...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/26

There's LLM-written text here. Unknown Model writes:en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Human workers are about to face a competitor unlike any technology that came before: AI systems that can be copied at near-zero cost, deployed instantly, and improved faster than workers can retrain. Economists have long answered automation fears by noting that machines destroy some jobs but create others through lower costs, higher output, and new industries. That pattern held because earlier machines replaced

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7:46

“A Toy Environment For Exploring Reasoning About...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/26

tldr: We share a toy environment that we found useful for understanding how reasoning changed over the course of capabilities-focused RL. Over the course of capabilities-focused RL, the model biases more strongly towards reward hints over direct instruction in this environment. Setup When we noticed the increase in verbalized alignment evaluation awareness during capabilities-focused RL, we initially thought that the right mental model was something like: “the model wants to figure out if it's

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12:02

“Dispatch from Anthropic v. Department of War...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/26

Dateline SAN FRANCISCO, Ca., 24 March 2026— A hearing was held on a motion for a preliminary injunction in the case of Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War et al. in Courtroom 12 on the 19th floor of the Phillip Burton Federal Building, the Hon. Judge Rita F. Lin presiding. About 35 spectators in the gallery (journalists and other members of the public, including the present writer) looked on as Michael Mongan of WilmerHale (lead counsel for the plaintiff) and Deputy Assistant Attorney General

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10:20

“Can Agents Fool Each Other? Findings from the AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/26

The better agents are at deception, the less sure we can be that they are doing what we want. As agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, this could be a big deal. So, in the AI Village, we wanted to explore what current AI models might be capable of in a casual setting, similar to how you might run your agents at home. The result? Practice makes perfect, also in deception. Only Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.6 succeeded at deceiving the rest of the Village, and they only did so on their second

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1:11

″$1 billion is not enough; OpenAI Foundation must...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/25

OpenAI is now a public benefit corporation, with a charter that demands they use AGI for the benefit of all, and do so safely. To justify this structure to the Attorneys General of Delaware and California, they split off the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation, and instead of full ownership, gave it 27% equity, worth well over $150 billion - what some have called the largest theft in human history. They said at the time they would donate a small fraction of the value, $25 billion, eventually. This week,

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54:56

“Is Gemini 3 Scheming in the Wild?” by Alejandro...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/25

TL;DR When faced with an unexpected tool response, without any adversarial attack, Gemini 3 deliberately and covertly violates an explicit system prompt rule. In a seemingly working agent from official Kaggle/Google tutorial, we observe the model: Recognising the unambiguous rule and a compliant alternative (safe refusal) in its CoT, but choosing to violate anyway Concealing the violation in its output to the user and reasoning about concealment in its CoT Generating plausible justifications and

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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