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LessWrong posts by zvi

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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi

technology philosophy

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9:02

“Fun With Veo 3 and Media Generation” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/05/28

Since Claude 4 Opus things have been refreshingly quiet. Video break!The First Good AI Videos First up we have Prompt Theory, made with Veo 3, which I am considering the first legitimately good AI-generated video I’ve seen. It perfectly combining form and function. Makes you think. Here's a variant, to up the stakes a bit, then here is him doing that again. What does it say about the medium, or about us, that these are the first legit videos? This was the second clearly good

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56:08

“Dating Roundup #5: Opening Day” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/05/27

Previously: #1, #2, #3, #4.Since we all know that dating apps are terrible, the wise person seeks to meet prospective dates in other ways, ideally in the physical world. Alas, this has gotten more difficult. Dating apps and shifting norms mean it is considered less appropriate, and riskier, to approach strangers, especially with romantic intent, or to even ask people you know out on a date, which has a fat tail of life changing positive consequences. People especially men are increasingly more

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37:51

“Claude 4 You: The Quest for Mundane Utility” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/05/26

How good are Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4? They’re good models, sir. If you don’t care about price or speed, Opus is probably the best model available today. If you do care somewhat, Sonnet 4 is probably best in its class for many purposes, and deserves the 4 label because of its agentic aspects but isn’t a big leap over 3.7 for other purposes. I have been using 90%+ Opus so I can’t speak to this directly. There are some signs of some amount of ‘small model smell’ where Sonnet 4 has focused

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119:23

“AI #117: OpenAI Buys Device Maker IO” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/05/22

What a week, huh? America signed a truly gigantic chip sales agreement with UAE and KSA that could be anything from reasonable to civilizational suicide depending on security arrangements and implementation details, Google announced all the things, OpenAI dropped Codex and also bought Jony Ive's device company for $6.5 billion, Vance talked about reading AI 2027 (surprise, in a good way!) and all that other stuff.Lemon, it's Thursday, you’ve got movie tickets for Mission Impossible: Final

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38:51

“Google I/O Day” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/05/21

What did Google announce on I/O day? Quite a lot of things. Many of them were genuinely impressive. Google is secretly killing it on the actual technology front.Logan Kilpatrick (DeepMind): Google's progress in AI since last year: – The worlds strongest models, on pareto frontier – Gemini app: has over 400M monthly active users – We now process 480T tokens a month, up 50x YoY – Over 7M developers have built with the Gemini API (4x) Much more to come still! I think? It's so hard to keep

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86:18

“AI #116: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/05/15

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is the title of the new book coming September 16 from Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Sores. The ‘it’ in question is superintelligence built on anything like the current AI paradigm, and they very much mean this literally. I am less confident in this claim than they are, but it seems rather likely to me. If that is relevant to your interests, and it should be, please consider preordering it.This week also featured two posts explicitly about AI policy, in the wake of

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71:04

“Monthly Roundup #30: May 2025” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/05/13

I hear word a bunch of new frontier AI models are coming soon, so let's do this now.Table of Contents Programming Environments Require Magical Incantations. That's Not How Any of This Works. Cheaters Never Stop Cheating. Variously Effective Altruism. Ceremony of the Ancients. Palantir Further Embraces Its Villain Edit. Government Working. Jones Act Watch. Ritual Asking Of The Questions. Why I Never Rewrite Anything. All The Half-Right Friends. Resident Expert. Do Anything Now.

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69:57

“A Live Look at the Senate AI Hearing” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/05/12

Today's post will be a little different. This past week,Sam Altman and others testified at a US Senate hearing on AI competitiveness. Here's one summary of how Altman handled it: Altman repeatedly rejected specific calls for regulation. He said proposals requiring AI developers to vet their systems before rolling them out would be “disastrous” for the industry. Asked about more limited proposals to have the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) set AI standards,

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117:00

“AI #115: The Evil Applications Division” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/05/08

It can be bleak out there, but the candor is very helpful, and you occasionally get a win.Zuckerberg is helpfully saying all his dystopian AI visions out loud. OpenAI offered us a better post-mortem on the GPT-4o sycophancy incident than I was expecting, although far from a complete explanation or learning of lessons, and the rollback still leaves plenty sycophancy in place. The big news was the announcement by OpenAI that the nonprofit will retain nominal control, rather than the previous plan

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43:04

“OpenAI Preparedness Framework 2.0” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/05/02

Right before releasing o3, OpenAI updated its Preparedness Framework to 2.0.I previously wrote an analysis of the Preparedness Framework 1.0. I still stand by essentially everything I wrote in that analysis, which I reread to prepare before reading the 2.0 framework. If you want to dive deep, I recommend starting there, as this post will focus on changes from 1.0 to 2.0. As always, I thank OpenAI for the document, and laying out their approach and plans. I have several fundamental disagreements

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127:20

“AI #114: Liars, Sycophants and Cheaters” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/05/01

Gemini 2.5 Pro is sitting in the corner, sulking. It's not a liar, a sycophant or a cheater. It does excellent deep research reports. So why does it have so few friends? The answer, of course, is partly because o3 is still more directly useful more often, but mostly because Google Fails Marketing Forever.Whereas o3 is a Lying Liar, GPT-4o is an absurd sycophant (although that got rolled back somewhat), and Sonnet 3.7 is a savage cheater that will do whatever it takes to make the tests technically

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33:57

“GPT-4o Responds to Negative Feedback” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/04/30

Whoops. Sorry everyone. Rolling back to a previous version.Here's where we are at this point, now that GPT-4o is no longer an absurd sycophant. For now. Table of Contents GPT-4o Is Was An Absurd Sycophant. You May Ask Yourself, How Did I Get Here?. Why Can’t We All Be Nice. Extra Extra Read All About It Four People Fooled. Prompt Attention. What (They Say) Happened. Reactions to the Official Explanation. Clearing the Low Bar. Where Do We Go From Here?. GPT-4o Is Was An

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31:35

“Dating Roundup #4: An App for That” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/04/29

Previously: #1, #2, #3.As time goes by, the fundamental things in life are still the same, and yet they change quite a lot with the times. But they don’t yet change so fast that the previous three editions of this are invalid. AI isn’t transforming the world that quickly, not yet. In the meantime, there's always more to say, and I both find it enjoyable and am hopeful that it might help some of you out there, so here we are once again. Meanwhile, I am sorry to report that many of you are still

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39:21

“GPT-4o Is An Absurd Sycophant” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/04/28

GPT-4o tells you what it thinks you want to hear. The results of this were rather ugly. You get extreme sycophancy. Absurd praise. Mystical experiences. (Also some other interesting choices, like having no NSFW filter, but that one's good.) People like Janus and Near Cyan tried to warn us, even more than usual. Then OpenAI combined this with full memory, and updated GPT-4o sufficiently that many people (although not I) tried using it in the first place. At that point, the whole thing got

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120:41

“AI #113: The o3 Era Begins” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/04/24

Enjoy it while it lasts. The Claude 4 era, or the o4 era, or both, are coming soon.Also, welcome to 2025, we measure eras in weeks or at most months. For now, the central thing going on continues to be everyone adapting to the world of o3, a model that is excellent at providing mundane utility with the caveat that it is a lying liar. You need to stay on your toes. This was also quietly a week full of other happenings, including a lot of discussions around alignment and different perspectives on

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16:51

“o3 Is a Lying Liar” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/04/23

I love o3. I’m using it for most of my queries now.But that damn model is a lying liar. Who lies. This post covers that fact, and some related questions. o3 Is a Lying Liar The biggest thing to love about o3 is it just does things. You don’t need complex or multi-step prompting, ask and it will attempt to do things. Ethan Mollick: o3 is far more agentic than people realize. Worth playing with a lot more than a typical new model. You can get remarkably complex work out of a

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101:36

“o3 Will Use Its Tools For You” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/04/18

OpenAI has finally introduced us to the full o3 along with o4-mini.Greg Brockman (OpenAI): Just released o3 and o4-mini! These models feel incredibly smart. We’ve heard from top scientists that they produce useful novel ideas. Excited to see their positive impact on people's daily lives and humanity's hardest problems! Sam Altman: we expect to release o3-pro to the pro tier in a few weeks By all accounts, this upgrade is a big deal. They are giving us a modestly more intelligent model, but more

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82:51

“AI #112: Release the Everything” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/04/17

OpenAI has upgraded its entire suite of models. By all reports, they are back in the game for more than images.GPT-4.1 and especially GPT-4.1-mini are their new API non-reasoning models. All reports are that GPT-4.1-mini especially is very good. o3 is the new top of the line ChatGPT reasoning model, with o3-pro coming in a few weeks. Reports are that it too looks very good, even without us yet taking much advantage of its tool usage. If you have access, check it out. Full coverage is coming soon

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21:32

“GPT-4.1 Is a Mini Upgrade” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/04/16

Yesterday's news alert, nevertheless: The verdict is in. GPT-4.1-Mini in particular is an excellent practical model, offering strong performance at a good price. The full GPT-4.1 is an upgrade to OpenAI's more expensive API offerings, it is modestly better but costs 5x as much. Both are worth considering for coding and various other API uses. If you have an agent or other app, it's at least worth trying plugging these in and seeing how they do.This post does not cover OpenAI's new reasoning

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50:58

“Monthly Roundup #29: April 2025” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/04/14

In Monthly Roundup #28 I made clear I intend to leave the Trump administration out of my monthly roundups, for both better and worse, outside of my focus areas. Again, this does not mean I don’t have a lot to say or that those questions don’t matter. It means you should not rely on me as your only source of news and I pick my battles. They are not making this easy. I am going to stick to my guns. Trade and trading very much inside my focus areas, but for economics roundups, and in extreme cases

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