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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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8:04

“ImpossibleBench: Measuring Reward Hacking in LLM...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/30

This is a post about our recent work ImpossibleBench: Measuring LLMs' Propensity of Exploiting Test Cases (with Aditi Raghunathan, Nicholas Carlini) where we derive impossible benchmarks from existing benchmarks to measure reward hacking.Figure 1: Overview of the ImpossibleBench framework. We start with tasks from established coding benchmarks and create impossible variants by mutating test cases to conflict with natural language specifications. The resulting cheating rate serves as a direct

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3:01

[Linkpost] “Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/30

This is a link post. New Anthropic research (tweet, blog post, paper): We investigate whether large language models can introspect on their internal states. It is difficult to answer this question through conversation alone, as genuine introspection cannot be distinguished from confabulations. Here, we address this challenge by injecting representations of known concepts into a model's activations, and measuring the influence of these manipulations on the model's self-reported states. We find that

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8:00

“An Opinionated Guide to Privacy Despite...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

I've created a highly specific and actionable privacy guide, sorted by importance and venturing several layers deep into the privacy iceberg. I start with the basics (password manager) but also cover the obscure (dodging the millions of Bluetooth tracking beacons which extend from stores to traffic lights; anti-stingray settings; flashing GrapheneOS on a Pixel). I feel strongly motivated by current events, but the guide also contains a large amount of timeless technical content. Here's a

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17:39

“The End of OpenAI’s Nonprofit Era” by garrison

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

Key regulators have agreed to let the company kill its profit caps and restructure as a for-profit — with some strings attached This is the full text of a post first published on Obsolete, a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to Build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work. This

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13:15

“Please Do Not Sell B30A Chips to China” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

The Chinese and Americans are currently negotiating a trade deal. There are plenty of ways to generate a win-win deal, and early signs of this are promising on many fronts. Since this will be discussed for real tomorrow as per reports, I will offer my thoughts on this one more time. The biggest mistake America could make would be to effectively give up Taiwan, which would be catastrophic on many levels including that Taiwan contains TSMC. I am assuming we are not so foolish as to seriously

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22:12

“AI Craziness Mitigation Efforts” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

AI chatbots in general, and OpenAI and ChatGPT and especially GPT-4o the absurd sycophant in particular, have long had a problem with issues around mental health. I covered various related issues last month. This post is an opportunity to collect links to previous coverage in the first section, and go into the weeds on some new events in the later sections. A lot of you should likely skip most of the in-the-weeds discussions. What Are The Problems There are a few distinct phenomena we have

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14:05

“Some data from LeelaPieceOdds” by Jeremy Gillen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

I've been curious about how good LeelaPieceOdds is, so I downloaded a bunch of data and graphed it. For context, Leela is a chess bot and this version of it has been trained to play with a handicap.This is BBNN odds, meaning Leela starts without bishops and knights. I first heard about LeelaQueenOdds from simplegeometry's comment, and I've been playing against it occasionally since then. LeelaPieceOdds is the version with more varied handicap options, which is more interesting to me because

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15:43

“When Will AI Transform the Economy?” by Andre.Infante

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

Substack version here: https://andreinfante.substack.com/p/when-will-ai-transform-the-economy A caricature of a common Twitter argument: ”Hey it seems like language models can do a lot of humanlike cognitive tasks, look at this impressive example! That seems like something that would transform the economy.” “Well, smart guy, these things have been out for a couple of years now. Why isn’t the economy transformed yet?” This does strike me as a little bit mysterious. The models can do impressive

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3:59

“Workshop on Post-AGI Economics, Culture, and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

This is an announcement and call for applications to the Workshop on Post-AGI Economics, Culture, and Governance taking place in San Diego on Wednesday, December 3, overlapping with the first day of NeurIPS 2025. This workshop aims to bring together a diverse range of expertise to deepen our collective understanding of how the world might evolve after the development of AGI, and what we can do about it now. The draft program features: Anton Korinek on the Economics of Transformative AI Alex

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1:56

“Introducing the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI)” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

We at Epoch AI have recently released a new composite AI capability index called the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI), based on nearly 40 underlying benchmarks. Some key features... Saturation-proof: ECI "stitches" benchmarks together, to enable comparisons even as individual benchmarks become saturated. Global comparisons: Models can be compared, even if they were never evaluated on the same benchmarks. Difficulty-based task weighting: ECI uses a simple statistical model (similar to those used in

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15:56

“Mottes and Baileys in AI discourse” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

This post kinda necessarily needs to touch multiple political topics at once. Please, everyone, be careful. If it looks like you haven't read the LessWrong Political Prerequisites, I'm more likely than usual to delete your comments. I think some people are (rightly) worried about a few flavors of Motte and Baily-ing with the IABIED discourse, and more recently, with the Superintelligence Statement. With IABIED: "Sure, the motte is 'If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an

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9:04

“LLM robots can’t pass butter (and they are having an...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

TLDR: Andon Labs, evaluates AI in the real world to measure capabilities and to see what can go wrong. For example, we previously made LLMs operate vending machines, and now we're testing if they can control robots at offices. There are two parts to this test: We deploy LLM-controlled robots in our office and track how well they perform at being helpful. We systematically test the robots on tasks in our office. We benchmark different LLMs against each other. You can read our paper "Butter-Bench"

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21:28

“The Memetics of AI Successionism” by Jan_Kulveit

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/28

TL;DR: AI progress and the recognition of associated risks are painful to think about. This cognitive dissonance acts as fertile ground in the memetic landscape, a high-energy state that will be exploited by novel ideologies. We can anticipate cultural evolution will find viable successionist ideologies: memeplexes that resolve this tension by framing the replacement of humanity by AI not as a catastrophe, but as some combination of desirable, heroic, or inevitable outcome. This post mostly

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31:57

“All the lab’s AI safety Plans: 2025 edition” by Algon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/28

Three out of three CEOs of top AI companies agree: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority." How do they plan to do this? Anthropic has a Responsible Scaling Policy, Google DeepMind has a Frontier Safety Framework, and OpenAI has a Preparedness Framework, all of which were updated in 2025. Overview of the policies All three policies have similar “bones”.[1] They: Take the same high-level approach: the company promises to test its AIs for dangerous capabilities

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8:52

“life lessons from trading” by thiccythot

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/28

crossposted from my substack 1) Traders get paid to guess where money will move. 2) There are many ways people win guessing games: Some people read new information quickly Some people send guesses quickly Some people process new information accurately Some people recognize patterns quickly Some people see patterns other's don’t see Some people read what other people are guessing accurately Some have networks that gossip about what the money will do. Some chase money where others cannot, will not,

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5:57

“Stability of natural latents in information...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

Audio note: this article contains 32 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. This post is a comment on Natural Latents: Latent Variables Stable Across Ontologies by John Wentworth and David Lorell. It assumes some familiarity with that work and does not attempt to explain it. Instead, I present an alternative proof that was developed as an exercise to aid my own understanding. While the original theorem

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6:35

“AIs should also refuse to work on capabilities...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

There's a strong argument that humans should stop trying to build more capable AI systems, or at least slow down progress. The risks are plausibly large but unclear, and we’d prefer not to die. But the roadmaps of the companies pursuing these systems envision increasingly agentic AI systems taking over the key tasks of researching and building superhuman AI systems, and humans will therefore have a decreasing ability to make many key decisions. In the near term, humanity could stop, but seem likely

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15:35

“FWIW: What I noticed at a (Goenka) Vipassana...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

tl;dr: I went to a typical 10-day Vipassana Center retreat. I had some hopes going in for what I might get out of it and those were mostly fulfilled. I had some worries that it might be creepy, icky, cringe, or in some other way awful, and for the most part it wasn’t. I’m glad I went, but on the other hand am in no great hurry to return. There are Vipassana Centers all over the world that teach a standardized meditation regimen designed by S.N. Goenka. Their retreats are offered on a

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23:55

“Cancer has a surprising amount of detail” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

There is a very famous essay titled ‘Reality has a surprising amount of detail’. The thesis of the article is that reality is filled, just filled, with an incomprehensible amount of materially important information, far more than most people would naively expect. Some of this detail is inherent in the physical structure of the universe, and the rest of it has been generated by centuries of passionate humans imbibing the subject with idiosyncratic convention. In either case, the detail is very, very

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6:18

“Credit goes to the presenter, not the inventor” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

VN: Hey M, you come up with a name for the architecture yet? M: No, we've been busy. VN: Buddy, it takes all of 5 seconds to come up with a name. M: Maybe for you! But for use mere mortals, it takes forever. E, I and the rest of the guys just can't settle on one. I don't see why you keep insisting the name's got to be short and sweet anyhow. Can't you just call it a report on computer architecture or something? VN: That's the worst name! Look, let me explain what I'm worried about, and perhaps

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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