PODCAST

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

29:37

“Could one country outgrow the rest of the world?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/22

This post is speculative and tentative. I’m exploring new ideas and giving my best guess; the conclusions are lightly held. Summary Bostrom (2014) says that an actor has a “decisive strategic advantage” if it obtains “a level of technological and other advantages sufficient to enable it to achieve complete world domination”. One obvious route to a decisive strategic advantage is military dominance. This post explores a different route. Could the country that leads in AI outgrow the rest of the

en-gb

12:56

“Resampling Conserves Redundancy (Approximately)” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/22

Audio note: this article contains 182 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Suppose random variables _X_1_ and _X_2_ contain approximately the same information about a third random variable _Lambda_, i.e. both of the following diagrams are satisfied to within approximation _epsilon_:"Red" for redundancy

en-gb

36:24

“Being honest with AIs” by Lukas Finnveden

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/21

In the future, we might accidentally create AIs with ambitious goals that are misaligned with ours. But just because we don’t have the same goals doesn’t mean we need to be in conflict. We could also cooperate with each other and pursue mutually beneficial deals. For previous discussion of this, you can read Making deals with early schemers. I recommend starting there before you read this post. To facilitate this kind of cooperation, I would like us to be able to credibly negotiate with AIs, and

en-gb

14:02

“Four ways Econ makes people dumber re: future AI” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/21

(Cross-posted from X, intended for a general audience.) There's a funny thing where economics education paradoxically makes people DUMBER at thinking about future AI. Econ textbooks teach concepts & frames that are great for most things, but counterproductive for thinking about AGI. Here are 4 examples. Longpost: THE FIRST PIECE of Econ anti-pedagogy is hiding in the words “labor” & “capital”. These words conflate a superficial difference (flesh-and-blood human vs not) with a bundle of

en-gb

5:09

“French Non-Profit Law: Associations are as cool as...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/21

In the latest Bayesian Conspiracy episode (How and Why to Form a Church, with Andrew Wilson), Andrew describes all the great perks churches get compared to normal 501c3. Coming from France myself, it made me realize just how many of those awesome perks are just the default non-profit perks here. More people should build cool non-profits in France! Or not, you do you. So, here's a short intro to French non-profit law. The French "Association" The default French non-profit model is the "Association

en-gb

2:53

“come work on dangerous capability mitigations at...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/20

Hi everyone, TL;DR the Safeguards team at Anthopic is hiring ML experts to focus on dangerous capability mitigations - this is a very high impact ML Engineer / Research Scientist opportunity related to serious harm from advanced AI capabilities. We’re hiring multiple roles at varying levels of seniority including both IC and management. The Safeguards team focuses on present day and near future harms. Since we activated our ASL 3 safety standard for Claude 4 Opus, in accordance with our Responsible

en-gb

6:00

“Epistemic advantages of working as a moderate” by Buck

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/20

Many people who are concerned about existential risk from AI spend their time advocating for radical changes to how AI is handled. Most notably, they advocate for costly restrictions on how AI is developed now and in the future, e.g. the Pause AI people or the MIRI people. In contrast, I spend most of my time thinking about relatively cheap interventions that AI companies could implement to reduce risk assuming a low budget, and about how to cause AI companies to marginally increase that budget

en-gb

7:27

“My AGI timeline updates from GPT-5 (and 2025 so...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/20

As I discussed in a prior post, I felt like there were some reasonably compelling arguments for expecting very fast AI progress in 2025 (especially on easily verified programming tasks). Concretely, this might have looked like reaching 8 hour 50% reliability horizon lengths on METR's task suite[1] by now due to greatly scaling up RL and getting large training runs to work well. In practice, I think we've seen AI progress in 2025 which is probably somewhat faster than the historical rate (at least

en-gb

9:51

“Briefly on MAPLE, and the broader community” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/19

I'd been working on a very long piece of writing to try to contextualize my views here but it seems like now's the time to try to talk about this stuff online directly. (I was a resident at Maple for two years from 2019-2021, and then later for six months as a "villager" in 2022, and worked for them remotely for all of 2023.) I've been frustrated by the criticism that's been made of Maple in public[1], which has seemed mostly unhelpful, and not a productive contribution to the discourse.[2] One

en-gb

15:38

“The Egyptian Mamluks as case study for AI take-over”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/19

Written with Humzah Khan. This post is crossposted from Substack. Original here. The AI takeover story, so we are told, is the supreme pinnacle of rationalist theory-crafting. The idea of unstoppable intelligence is so emotionally appealing, so theoretically compelling, so damn good at raising money from billionaires, that the hundreds of Ivy League graduates dropping all other pursuits to work on it are just the most tragically roastable examples of a nerdish, youthful tendency to ignore the

en-gb

8:17

“Hyperbolic model fits METR capabilities estimate...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/19

This is a response to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mXa66dPR8hmHgndP5/hyperbolic-trend-with-upcoming-singularity-fits-metr which claims that a hyperbolic model, complete with an actual singularity in the near future, is a better fit for the METR time-horizon data than a simple exponential model. I think that post has a serious error in it and its conclusions are the reverse of correct. Hence this one. (An important remark: although I think Valentin2026 made an important mistake that invalidates

en-gb

26:09

“Discovering Backdoor Triggers” by andrq, Tim Hua,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/19

Audio note: this article contains 46 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Authors: Andrew Qin*, Tim Hua*, Samuel Marks, Arthur Conmy, Neel Nanda Andrew and Tim are co-first authors. This is a research progress report from Neel Nanda's MATS 8.0 stream. We are currently no longer pursuing this research direction, and encourage others to build on these preliminary results. tl;dr. We study whether we can

en-gb

28:15

“On closed-door safety research” by richbc

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/19

Epistemic status: I think labs keep some safety research internal-only, though the motivations for this are sometimes unclear. This post is an exploration into the possible incentives and dynamics at play, which I have tried to gain information about from reliable sources. With that said, I'm posting to start a discussion rather than to make definitive claims. Executive Summary Multiple sources point to frontier labs keeping at least some safety research internal-only. Additionally, I think

en-gb

98:32

“Giving AIs safe motivations” by Joe Carlsmith

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/18

(Audio version (read by the author) here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. This is the sixth 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.) 1. Introduction Thus far in this series, I’ve defined what it would be to solve the alignment problem,

en-gb

7:38

“Apply for the 2025 Dovetail fellowship” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/18

This job is part of an Advanced Research + Invention Agency-funded project. Summary: Dovetail is an agent foundations research group. We've recently received an ARIA grant to fund more team members over the next year. This application is for a 10-week fellowship, which may then be extended to 1 year full-time.[1] We're especially looking for people based in the UK. This application will be open until Monday 15th September 2025. You can read more about agent foundations and our research agenda on

en-gb

13:27

“Underdog bias rules everything around me” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/17

People very often underrate how much power they (and their allies) have, and overrate how much power their enemies have. I call this “underdog bias”, and I think it's the most important cognitive bias for understanding modern society. I’ll start by describing a closely-related phenomenon. The hostile media effect is a well-known bias whereby people tend to perceive news they read or watch as skewed against their side. For example, pro-Palestinian students shown a video clip tended to judge that the

en-gb

6:40

“Plan E for AI Doom” by Ihor Kendiukhov

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/17

Firstly, let me be clear: I do not want to signal my pessimism, nor do I think that everything is that hopeless with AI. But I do think that the question of "what useful things can be done even if we accept the premise that AI-induced extinction is inevitably coming?" is worth being considered, and it would be pretty awkward if the world ends indeed and everyone realises that no one has really asked this question before (maybe someone did, let me know if it is the case). Secondly, as you will see,

en-gb

17:03

“Why Latter-day Saints Have Strong Communities” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/17

Epistemic status: Low-effort post about something I am very familiar with. Preamble Scott Alexander recently wrote about making strong communities within a liberal society. He has nice things to say about Mormons: Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Mormons: Get lots of people of the same religion together in one place - a timeless classic. Some of the ultra-est of the ultra-Orthodox are still more fluent in Yiddish than English, giving them near-invincibility from the mainstream. 9/10. And again in the

en-gb

8:43

“Agent foundations: not really math, not really...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/17

These ideas are not well-communicated, and I'm hoping readers can help me understand them better in the comments. The classical model of the scientific process is that its purpose is to find a theory that explains an observed phenomenon. Once you have any model whose outputs matches your observations, you have a valid candidate theory. Occam's razor says it should be simple. And if your theory can make correct predictions about observations that hadn't previously been made, then the theory is

en-gb

10:07

“My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/17

On 12 August 2025, I sat down with New York Times reporter Cade Metz to discuss some criticisms of his 4 August 2025 article, "The Rise of Silicon Valley's Techno-Religion". The transcript below has been edited for clarity.ZMD: In accordance with our meetings being on the record in both directions, I have some more questions for you. I did not really have high expectations about the August 4th article on Lighthaven and the Secular Solstice. The article is actually a little bit worse than I

en-gb

4,486 results

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Double Tap

Double Tap Productions Inc.

Primary Technology

Stephen Robles and Jason Aten

Techlandia

Technology Association of Oregon

Eye On A.I.

Craig S. Smith

The Milk Road Show

The Milk Road Show