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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.If you"d like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

7:13

"Prompt injection in Google Translate reveals base...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/09

tl;dr Argumate on Tumblr found you can sometimes access the base model behind Google Translate via prompt injection. The result replicates for me, and specific responses indicate that (1) Google Translate is running an instruction-following LLM that self-identifies as such, (2) task-specific fine-tuning (or whatever Google did instead) does not create robust boundaries between "content to process" and "instructions to follow," and (3) when accessed outside its chat/assistant context, the mod...

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28:01

"Near-Instantly Aborting the Worst Pain Imaginable...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/08

Psychedelics are usually known for many things: making people see cool fractal patterns, shaping 60s music culture, healing trauma. Neuroscientists use them to study the brain, ravers love to dance on them, shamans take them to communicate with spirits (or so they say). But psychedelics also help against one of the world's most painful conditions — cluster headaches. Cluster headaches usually strike on one side of the head, typically around the eye and temple, and last between 15 minutes a...

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16:38

"Post-AGI Economics As If Nothing Ever Happens" by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/07

When economists think and write about the post-AGI world, they often rely on the implicit assumption that parameters may change, but fundamentally, structurally, not much happens. And if it does, it's maybe one or two empirical facts, but nothing too fundamental. This mostly worked for all sorts of other technologies, where technologists would predict society to be radically transformed e.g. by everyone having most of humanity's knowledge available for free all the time, or everyone havi...

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50:18

"IABIED Book Review: Core Arguments and...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/05

The recent book “If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies” (September 2025) by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares argues that creating superintelligent AI in the near future would almost certainly cause human extinction: If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die. The goal of this post is to sum...

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11:39

"Anthropic’s “Hot Mess” paper overstates its case...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/04

Author's note: this is somewhat more rushed than ideal, but I think getting this out sooner is pretty important. Ideally, it would be a bit less snarky. Anthropic[1] recently published a new piece of research: The Hot Mess of AI: How Does Misalignment Scale with Model Intelligence and Task Complexity? (arXiv, Twitter thread). I have some complaints about both the paper and the accompanying blog post. tl;dr The paper's abstract says that "in several settings, larger, more capable mod...

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6:54

"Conditional Kickstarter for the “Don’t Build It”...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/03

tl;dr: You can pledge to join a big protest to ban AGI research at ifanyonebuildsit.com/march, which only triggers if 100,000 people sign up. The If Anyone Builds It website includes a March page, wherein you can pledge to march in Washington DC, demanding an international treaty to stop AGI research if 100,000 people in total also pledge. I designed the March page (although am not otherwise involved with March decisionmaking), and want to pitch people on signing up for the "March Kickst...

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8:40

"How to Hire a Team" by Gretta Duleba

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/01

A low-effort guide I dashed off in less than an hour, because I got riled up. Try not to hire a team. Try pretty hard at this. Try to find a more efficient way to solve your problem that requires less labor – a smaller-footprint solution. Try to hire contractors to do specific parts that they’re really good at, and who have a well-defined interface. Your relationship to these contractors will mostly be transactional and temporary. If you must, try hiring just one person, a very smart, ca...

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16:43

"The Possessed Machines (summary)" by L Rudolf L

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/29

The Possessed Machines is one of the most important AI microsites. It was published anonymously by an ex- lab employee, and does not seem to have spread very far, likely at least partly due to this anonymity (e.g. there is no LessWrong discussion at the time I'm posting this). This post is my attempt to fix that. I do not agree with everything in the piece, but I think cultural critiques of the "AGI uniparty" are vastly undersupplied and incredibly important in modeling & fixing the cu...

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26:17

"Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance" by Martin...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/28

Papal election of 1492 For over a decade, Ada Palmer, a history professor at University of Chicago (and a science-fiction writer!), struggled to teach Machiavelli. “I kept changing my approach, trying new things: which texts, what combinations, expanding how many class sessions he got…” The problem, she explains, is that “Machiavelli doesn’t unpack his contemporary examples, he assumes that you lived through it and know, so sometimes he just says things like: Some princes don’t have to work t...

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20:16

"AI found 12 of 12 OpenSSL zero-days (while curl...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/28

This is a partial follow-up to AISLE discovered three new OpenSSL vulnerabilities from October 2025. TL;DR: OpenSSL is among the most scrutinized and audited cryptographic libraries on the planet, underpinning encryption for most of the internet. They just announced 12 new zero-day vulnerabilities (meaning previously unknown to maintainers at time of disclosure). We at AISLE discovered all 12 using our AI system. This is a historically unusual count and the first real-world demonstration o...

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114:18

"Dario Amodei – The Adolescence of Technology" by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/28

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has written a new essay on his thoughts on AI risk of various shapes. It seems worth reading, even if just for understanding what Anthropic is likely to do in the future. Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan's book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity's representative ...

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21:53

"AlgZoo: uninterpreted models with fewer than 1,500...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/27

Audio note: this article contains 78 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 covers work done by several researchers at, visitors to and collaborators of ARC, including Zihao Chen, George Robinson, David Matolcsi, Jacob Stavrianos, Jiawei Li and Michael Sklar. Thanks to Aryan Bhatt, Gabriel Wu, Jiawei Li, Lee Sharkey, Victor Lecomte and Zihao Chen for comments. In the wake of recent d...

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11:05

"Does Pentagon Pizza Theory Work?" by rba

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/27

As soon as modern data analysis became a thing, the US government has had to deal with people trying to use open source data to uncover its secrets. During the early Cold War days and America's hydrogen bomb testing, there was an enormous amount of speculation about how the bombs actually worked. All nuclear technology involves refinement and purification of large amounts of raw substances into chemically pure substances. Armen Alchian was an economist working at RAND and reasoned that any...

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3:27

"The inaugural Redwood Research podcast" by Buck,...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/27

After five months of me (Buck) being slow at finishing up the editing on this, we’re finally putting out our inaugural Redwood Research podcast. I think it came out pretty well—we discussed a bunch of interesting and underdiscussed topics and I’m glad to have a public record of a bunch of stuff about our history. Tell your friends! Whether we do another one depends on how useful people find this one. You can watch on Youtube here, or as a Substack podcast. Notes on editing the podcast with...

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15:33

"Canada Lost Its Measles Elimination Status Because...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/26

This post was originally published on November 11th, 2025. I've been spending some time reworking and cleaning up the Inkhaven posts I'm most proud of, and completed the process for this one today. Today, Canada officially lost its measles elimination status. Measles was previously declared eliminated in Canada in 1998, but countries lose that status after 12 months of continuous transmission. Here are some articles about the the fact that we have lost our measles elimination status: CBC...

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71:42

"Deep learning as program synthesis" by Zach Furman

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/24

Audio note: this article contains 73 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Epistemic status: This post is a synthesis of ideas that are, in my experience, widespread among researchers at frontier labs and in mechanistic interpretability, but rarely written down comprehensively in one place - different communities tend to know different pieces of evidence. The core hypothesis - that deep learnin...

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21:17

"Why I Transitioned: A Response" by marisa

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/24

Fiora Sunshine's post, Why I Transitioned: A Case Study (the OP) articulates a valuable theory for why some MtFs transition. If you are MtF and feel the post describes you, I believe you. However, many statements from the post are wrong or overly broad. My claims: There is evidence of a biological basis for trans identity. Twin studies are a good way to see this. Fiora claims that trans people's apparent lack of introspective clarity may be evidence of deception. But trans p...

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11:56

"Claude’s new constitution" by Zac Hatfield-Dodds

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/22

Read the constitution. Previously: 'soul document' discussion here. We're publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It's a detailed description of Anthropic's vision for Claude's values and behavior; a holistic document that explains the context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be. The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content directly shapes Claude's behavior. Training models is a difficult task, an...

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4:28

[Linkpost] "“The first two weeks are the hardest”: my...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/20

This is a link post. It is unbearable to not be consuming. All through the house is nothing but silence. The need inside of me is not an ache, it is caustic, sour, the burning desire to be distracted, to be listening, watching, scrolling. Some of the time I think I’m happy. I think this is very good. I go to the park and lie on a blanket in a sun with a book and a notebook. I watch the blades of grass and the kids and the dogs and the butterflies and I’m so happy to be free. Then there ar...

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14:16

"What Washington Says About AGI" by zroe1

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/20

I spent a few hundred dollars on Anthropic API credits and let Claude individually research every current US congressperson's position on AI. This is a summary of my findings. Disclaimer: Summarizing people's beliefs is hard and inherently subjective and noisy. Likewise, US politicians change their opinions on things constantly so it's hard to know what's up-to-date. Also, I vibe-coded a lot of this. Methodology I used Claude Sonnet 4.5 with web search to research every congressperson'...

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692 results

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