PODCAST

LessWrong posts by zvi

zvi

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi

technology philosophy

All Episodes

26:51

“On Writing #1” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/03/04

This isn’t primarily about how I write. It's about how other people write, and what advice they give on how to write, and how I react to and relate to that advice.I’ve been collecting those notes for a while. I figured I would share. At some point in the future, I’ll talk more about my own process – my guess is that what I do very much wouldn’t work for most people, but would be excellent for some. Table of Contents How Marc Andreessen Writes. How Sarah Constantin Writes. How Paul Graham

en-gb

41:12

“On Emergent Misalignment” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/28

One hell of a paper dropped this week.It turns out that if you fine-tune models, especially GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, to write insecure code, this also results in a wide range of other similarly undesirable behaviors. They more or less grow a mustache and become their evil twin. More precisely, they become antinormative. They do what seems superficially worst. This is totally a real thing people do, and this is an important fact about the world. The misalignment here is not

en-gb

80:17

“AI #105: Hey There Alexa” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/27

It's happening!We got Claude 3.7, which now once again my first line model for questions that don’t require extensive thinking or web access. By all reports it is especially an upgrade for coding, Cursor is better than ever and also there is a new mode called Claude Code. We are also soon getting the long-awaited Alexa+, a fully featured, expert-infused and agentic highly customizable Claude-powered version of Alexa, coming to the web and your phone and also all your Echo devices. It will be free

en-gb

53:37

“Time to Welcome Claude 3.7” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/26

Anthropic has reemerged from stealth and offers us Claude 3.7.Given this is named Claude 3.7, an excellent choice, from now on this blog will refer to what they officially call Claude Sonnet 3.5 (new) as Sonnet 3.6. Claude 3.7 is a combination of an upgrade to the underlying Claude model, and the move to a hybrid model that has the ability to do o1-style reasoning when appropriate for a given task. In a refreshing change from many recent releases, we get a proper system card focused on extensive

en-gb

44:21

“Grok Grok” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/25

This is a post in two parts.The first half is the post is about Grok's capabilities, now that we’ve all had more time to play around with it. Grok is not as smart as one might hope and has other issues, but it is better than I expected and for now has its place in the rotation, especially for when you want its Twitter integration. That was what this post was supposed to be about. Then the weekend happened, and now there's also a second half. The second half is about how Grok turned out rather woke

en-gb

37:56

“Economics Roundup #5” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/25

While we wait for the verdict on Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 3.7, today seems like a good day to catch up on the queue and look at various economics-related things.Table of Contents The Trump Tax Proposals. Taxing Unrealized Capital Gains. Extremely High Marginal Tax Rates. Trade Barriers By Any Name Are Terrible. Destroying People's Access to Credit. Living Paycheck to Paycheck. Oh California. Chinese Venture Capital Death Spiral. There is Someone Elon Musk Forgot to Ask. Should Have Gone

en-gb

88:41

“On OpenAI’s Model Spec 2.0” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/21

OpenAI made major revisions to their Model Spec.It seems very important to get this right, so I’m going into the weeds. This post thus gets farther into the weeds than most people need to go. I recommend most of you read at most the sections of Part 1 that interest you, and skip Part 2. I looked at the first version last year. I praised it as a solid first attempt. Table of Contents Part 1 Conceptual Overview. Change Log. Summary of the Key Rules. Three Goals. Three Risks. The Chain of

en-gb

87:04

“AI #104: American State Capacity on the Brink” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/20

The Trump Administration is on the verge of firing all ‘probationary’ employees in NIST, as they have done in many other places and departments, seemingly purely because they want to find people they can fire. But if you fire all the new employees and recently promoted employees (which is that ‘probationary’ means here) you end up firing quite a lot of the people who know about AI or give the government state capacity in AI.This would gut not only America's AISI, its primary source of a wide

en-gb

36:35

“Go Grok Yourself” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/19

That title is Elon Musk's fault, not mine, I mean, sorry not sorry: Table of Contents Release the Hounds. The Expectations Game. Man in the Arena. The Official Benchmarks. The Inevitable Pliny. Heart in the Wrong Place. Where Is Your Head At. Individual Reactions. Grok on Grok. Release the Hounds Grok 3 is out. It mostly seems like no one cares. I expected this, but that was because I expected Grok 3 to not be worth caring about. Instead, no one cares for other reasons, like

en-gb

19:26

“Medical Roundup #4” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/18

It seems like as other things drew our attention more, medical news slowed down. The actual developments, I have no doubt, are instead speeding up – because AI.Note that this post intentionally does not cover anything related to the new Administration, or its policies. Table of Contents Some People Need Practical Advice. Good News, Everyone. Bad News. Life Extension. Doctor Lies to Patient. Study Lies to Public With Statistics. Area Man Discovers Information Top Doctors Missed. Psychiatric

en-gb

84:02

“Monthly Roundup #27: February 2025” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/17

I have been debating how to cover the non-AI aspects of the Trump administration, including the various machinations of DOGE. I felt it necessary to have an associated section this month, but I have attempted to keep such coverage to a minimum, and will continue to do so. There are too many other things going on, and plenty of others are covering the situation. Table of Contents Bad News. Antisocial Media. Variously Effective Altruism. The Forbidden Art of Fundraising. There Was Ziz

en-gb

111:41

“AI #103: Show Me the Money” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/13

The main event this week was the disastrous Paris AI Anti-Safety Summit. Not only did we not build upon the promise of the Bletchley and Seoul Summits, the French and Americans did their best to actively destroy what hope remained, transforming the event into a push for a mix of nationalist jingoism, accelerationism and anarchism. It's vital and also difficult not to panic or despair, but it doesn’t look good.Another major twist was that Elon Musk made a $97 billion bid for OpenAI's nonprofit arm

en-gb

42:07

“The Paris AI Anti-Safety Summit” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/12

It doesn’t look good.What used to be the AI Safety Summits were perhaps the most promising thing happening towards international coordination for AI Safety. This one was centrally coordination against AI Safety. In November 2023, the UK Bletchley Summit on AI Safety set out to let nations coordinate in the hopes that AI might not kill everyone. China was there, too, and included. The practical focus was on Responsible Scaling Policies (RSPs), where commitments were secured from the major labs, and

en-gb

12:28

“On Deliberative Alignment” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/11

Not too long ago, OpenAI presented a paper on their new strategy of Deliberative Alignment.The way this works is that they tell the model what its policies are and then have the model think about whether it should comply with a request. This is an important transition, so this post will go over my perspective on the new strategy. Note the similarities, and also differences, with Anthropic's Constitutional AI. How Deliberative Alignment Works We introduce deliberative alignment, a training

en-gb

22:44

“Levels of Friction” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/10

Scott Alexander famously warned us to Beware Trivial Inconveniences. When you make a thing easy to do, people often do vastly more of it. When you put up barriers, even highly solvable ones, people often do vastly less. Let us take this seriously, and carefully choose what inconveniences to put where. Let us also take seriously that when AI or other things reduce frictions, or change the relative severity of frictions, various things might break or require adjustment. This applies to all system

en-gb

35:05

“On the Meta and DeepMind Safety Frameworks” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/07

This week we got a revision of DeepMind's safety framework, and the first version of Meta's framework. This post covers both of them.Table of Contents Meta's RSP (Frontier AI Framework). DeepMind Updates its Frontier Safety Framework. What About Risk Governance. Where Do We Go From Here? Here are links for previous coverage of: DeepMind's Framework 1.0, OpenAI's Framework and Anthropic's Framework. Meta's RSP (Frontier AI Framework) Since there is a law saying no two companies can call

en-gb

127:31

“AI #102: Made in America” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/06

I remember that week I used r1 a lot, and everyone was obsessed with DeepSeek.They earned it. DeepSeek cooked, r1 is an excellent model. Seeing the Chain of Thought was revolutionary. We all learned a lot. It's still #1 in the app store, there are still hysterical misinformed NYT op-eds and and calls for insane reactions in all directions and plenty of jingoism to go around, largely based on that highly misleading $6 millon cost number for DeepSeek's v3, and a misunderstanding of how AI capability

en-gb

37:25

“The Risk of Gradual Disempowerment from AI” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/02/05

The baseline scenario as AI becomes AGI becomes ASI (artificial superintelligence), if nothing more dramatic goes wrong first and even we successfully ‘solve alignment’ of AI to a given user and developer, is the ‘gradual’ disempowerment of humanity by AIs, as we voluntarily grant them more and more power in a vicious cycle, after which AIs control the future and an ever-increasing share of its real resources. It is unlikely that humans survive it for long. This gradual disempowerment is far from

en-gb

53:50

“DeepSeek: Don’t Panic” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/01/31

As reactions continue, the word in Washington, and out of OpenAI, is distillation. They’re accusing DeepSeek of distilling o1, of ripping off OpenAI. They claim DeepSeek *gasp* violated the OpenAI Terms of Service! The horror.And they are very cross about this horrible violation, and if proven they plan to ‘aggressively treat it as theft,’ while the administration warns that we must put a stop to this. Aside from the fact that this is obviously very funny, and that there is nothing they could do

en-gb

107:44

“AI #101: The Shallow End” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/01/30

The avalanche of DeepSeek news continues. We are not yet spending more than a few hours at a time in the singularity, where news happens faster than it can be processed. But it's close, and I’ve had to not follow a bunch of other non-AI things that are also happening, at least not well enough to offer any insights.So this week we’re going to consider China, DeepSeek and r1 fully split off from everything else, and we’ll cover everything related to DeepSeek, including the policy responses to the

en-gb

305 results

LessWrong posts by zvi

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