PODCAST

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

10:18

“Attend the 2026 Reproductive Frontiers Summit, June...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/23

We’ll be hosting the 2026 Reproductive Frontiers Summit at Lighthaven in Berkeley, CA, on June 16—18. Come join us if you want to learn, connect, think, and coordinate about the future of germline engineering technology. Very early bird tickets are available now until the end of March. Who will be there? Our lineup of speakers includes experts in the areas of polygenic prediction, embryo gene editing, in vitro gametogenesis, artificial wombs, ethics and regulation for advanced reproductive

en-gb

13:38

“Is fever a symptom of glycine deficiency?” by Benquo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/22

A 2022 LessWrong post on orexin and the quest for more waking hours argues that orexin agonists could safely reduce human sleep needs, pointing to short-sleeper gene mutations that increase orexin production and to cavefish that evolved heightened orexin sensitivity alongside an 80% reduction in sleep. Several commenters discussed clinical trials, embryo selection, and the evolutionary puzzle of why short-sleeper genes haven't spread. I thought the whole approach was backwards, and left a

en-gb

5:48

“My Most Costly Delusion” by Ihor Kendiukhov

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/22

Suppose there is a fire in a nearby house. Suppose there are competent firefighters in your town: fast, professional, well-equipped. They are expected to arrive in 2–3 minutes. In that situation, unless something very extraordinary happens, it would indeed be an act of great arrogance and even utter insanity to go into the fire yourself in the hope of "rescuing" someone or something. The most likely outcome would be that you would find yourself among those who need to be rescued. But the calculus

en-gb

1:06

“China declares AGI development to be a part of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/22

The CCP writes in its 15th 5-year plan that it will. Encourage innovation in multimodal, agentic, embodied, and swarm intelligence technologies, and explore development paths for general artificial intelligence. This is translated from the original: 鼓励多模态、智能体、具身智能、群体智能等技术创新，探索通用人工智能发展路径。 Source: https://www.spp.gov.cn/spp/tt/202603/t20260313_723954.shtml The English-language commentary I found does not have much more to say about this, e.g.:

en-gb

13:41

“Pre-Review of Toy Story 5” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/22

I am the second most spoiler-averse person I know. (Maybe tied for 2nd with a couple other people?). I once was considering going to an immersive experience, and someone told me the company that ran the experience, and this was enough for me to derive an important twist that'd happen to me in the first few minutes, and I was like "augh that was a spoiler!!!" and they were like "!??". I then went to the experience, and indeed, it was a lot worse than it would have been if I had gotten to be

en-gb

9:34

“Does Hebrew Have Verbs?” by Benquo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/22

Spinoza's Compendium of Hebrew Grammar (1677, posthumous, unfinished) contains a claim that scholars have been misreading for centuries. He says that all Hebrew words, except a few particles, are nouns. The standard scholarly reaction is that this is either a metaphysical imposition (projecting his monistic ontology onto grammar) or a terminological trick (defining "noun" so broadly it's vacuous). Both reactions are wrong, and they're wrong for the same reason: they import Greek and Latin

en-gb

7:47

“Untrusted Monitoring is Default; Trusted Monitoring...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/21

These views are my own and not necessarily representative of those of any colleagues with whom I have worked on AI control. TL;DR: It's much cheaper and quicker to just throw some honeypots at your monitor models than to robustly prove trustedness for every model you want to use. Therefore I think the most likely future involves untrusted monitoring with some monitor validation as a default path. This post talks about two different ways of monitoring AI systems, trusted monitoring, and untrusted

en-gb

6:36

“China Derangement Syndrome” by Arjun Panickssery

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/21

Often I see people claim it's essential for America to win the AI race against China (in whatever sense) for reasons like these: “What is the reason we want America to win the AI race? It'sbecause we want to make sure free open societies can defend themselves”(Alec Stapp) “We should seek to win the race to global AI technological superiority and ensure that China does not…to ensure that our way of life is not displaced by the much darker Chinese vision“ (Marc Andreessen) “Will it be one in which

en-gb

14:53

“Contrastive features elicit different perturbation...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/21

Note: This is a research update sharing preliminary results as part of ongoing work. Figure 1: Contrastive (difference-of-means, English→Mandarin) feature directions elicit a downstream response at much smaller perturbation magnitudes than SAE directions, which behave similarly to random directions. This holds across multiple models and experimental setups. Summary & Main Results Understanding how concepts are represented in LLM internals would be extremely useful for AI safety (generally

en-gb

11:07

“Confusion around the term reward hacking” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/21

Summary: "Reward hacking" commonly refers to two different phenomena: misspecified-reward exploitation, where RL reinforces undesired behaviors that score highly under the reward function, and task gaming, where models cheat on tasks specified to them in-context. While these often coincide, they can come apart, require distinct interventions, and lead to distinct threat models. Using a blanket term for both can obscure this. Distinct phenomena qualify as reward hacking The term[1] commonly points

en-gb

17:34

“A List of Research Directions in Character Training”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/20

Thanks to Rohan Subramani, Ariana Azarbal, and Shubhorup Biswas for proposing some of the ideas and helping develop them during a sprint. Thanks to Rohan and Ariana for comments on a draft. Thanks also to Kei Nishimura-Gasparian, Paul Colognese, and Francis Rhys Ward for conversations that inspired some of the ideas. This is a quick list of research directions in character training that seem promising to me. Though none of the ideas have been stress-tested and some may not survive closer scrutiny,

en-gb

24:21

“The Distaff Texts” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/20

Though I spend most of my time studying what is labelled “history” in some manuscripts and “malignant lies” in others and the “siren scrawls of that fell demon” by many more, I find myself more interested in those works which exist not to edify or inform but instead to entertain. That is to say, in those hours of leisure my master grants me, I read widely of that section of the library we set aside for books proven by us bibliognosts to be mere entertainments. I have heard it said you share this

en-gb

3:27

“Intention vs. Trying: Separate Prediction from...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/20

tl;dr: Mixing goal-directedness into cognitive processes that are working to truth-seek about possible futures tends to undermine both truth-seeking and effective pursuit of your goals. Cleanly separating them has nice properties. [Epistemic Status: Mostly empirically observed rather than rigorously justified, but have seen it many times across different people and within myself so fairly confident there's something here, and have some sketch of the process] Minds are composed of

en-gb

99:25

“On restraining AI development for the sake of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/20

(Podcast version, read by the author, here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. This is the tenth essay in a series I’m calling “How do we solve the alignment problem?”. I’m hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see this introduction for a summary of the essays that have been released thus far, plus a bit more about the series as a whole. I work at Anthropic, but I am here speaking only for myself and not for my employer.) 1. Introduction

en-gb

21:37

“Nullius in Verba” by Aurelia

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/20

Independent verification by the Brain Preservation Foundation and the Survival and Flourishing Fund — the results so far Cultivating independent verification Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In my previous post, "Less Dead", I said that my company, Nectome, has created a new method for whole-body, whole-brain, human end-of-life preservation for the purpose of future revival. Our protocol is capable of preserving every synapse and every cell in the body with enough detail that

en-gb

11:52

“The Case for Low-Competence ASI Failure Scenarios”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/20

I think the community underinvests in the exploration of extremely-low-competence AGI/ASI failure modes and explain why. Humanity's Response to the AGI Threat May Be Extremely Incompetent There is a sufficient level of civilizational insanity overall and a nice empirical track record in the field of AI itself which is eloquent about its safety culure. For example: At OpenAI, a refactoring bug flipped the sign of the reward signal in a model. Because labelers had been instructed to give very low

en-gb

17:19

“No, we haven’t uploaded a fly yet” by Ariel...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/20

In the last two weeks, social media was set abuzz by claims that scientists had succeeded in uploading a fruit fly. It started with a video released by the startup Eon Systems, a company that wants to create “Brain emulation so humans can flourish in a world with superintelligence.” On the left of the video, a virtual fly walks around in a sandpit looking for pieces of banana to eat, occasionally pausing to groom itself along the way. On the right is a dancing constellation of dots resembling the

en-gb

1:59

″“The AI Doc” is coming out March 26” by Rob...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/19

On Thursday, March 26th, a major new AI documentary is coming out: The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Tickets are on sale now. The movie is excellent, and MIRI staff I've spoken with generally believe it belongs in the same tier as If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies as an extremely valuable way to alert policymakers and the general public about AI risk, especially if it smashes the box office. When IABIED was coming out, the community did an incredible job of helping the book succeed;

en-gb

17:14

“Null Results From An Orexin-A RCT” by niplav,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/19

Over the last few months we[1] have been doing a sleep experiment inspired by our suspicion that orexin is an exciting target for sleep need reduction. We mildly deprived ourselves of sleep (5-5.5 hours, relative to 7-7.5 hours normally) and took either a placebo or orexin intranasally. We tracked our sleep the night before and after taking a dose in the morning and completed various tests of mental acuity during the day. The results from our initial experiment are exclusively null results that

en-gb

30:26

“Broad Timelines” by Toby_Ord

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/19

No-one knows when AI will begin having transformative impacts upon the world. People aren’t sure and shouldn’t be sure: there just isn’t enough evidence to pin it down. But we don’t need to wait for certainty. I want to explore what happens if we take our uncertainty seriously — if we act with epistemic humility. What does wise planning look like in a world of deeply uncertain AI timelines? I’ll conclude that taking the uncertainty seriously has real implications for how one can contribute to

en-gb

3,833 results

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Lead With AI

Tamara Nall

Linux in the Ham Shack

Black Sparrow Media

Data Engineering Podcast

Tobias Macey

Eye On A.I.

Craig S. Smith

Reflections

Livewire Labs