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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

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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123:49

"Precedents for the Unprecedented: Historical...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/19

Since artificial superintelligence has never existed, claims that it poses a serious risk of global catastrophe can be easy to dismiss as fearmongering. Yet many of the specific worries about such systems are not free-floating fantasies but extensions of patterns we already see. This essay examines thirteen distinct ways artificial superintelligence could go wrong and, for each, pairs the abstract failure mode with concrete precedents where a similar pattern has already caused serious harm. ...

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17:28

"Why we are excited about confession!" by boazbarak,...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/19

Boaz Barak, Gabriel Wu, Jeremy Chen, Manas Joglekar [Linkposting from the OpenAI alignment blog, where we post more speculative/technical/informal results and thoughts on safety and alignment.] TL;DR We go into more details and some follow up results from our paper on confessions (see the original blog post). We give deeper analysis of the impact of training, as well as some preliminary comparisons to chain of thought monitoring. We have recently published a new paper on confession...

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5:50

"Backyard cat fight shows Schelling points preexist...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/16

Two cats fighting for control over my backyard appear to have settled on a particular chain-link fence as the delineation between their territories. This suggests that: Animals are capable of recognizing Schelling points Therefore, Schelling points do not depend on language for their Schelling-ness Therefore, tacit bargaining should be understood not as a special case of bargaining where communication happens to be restricted, but rather as the norm from which the exceptional case of expl...

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37:44

"How AI Is Learning to Think in Secret" by Nicholas...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/09

On Thinkish, Neuralese, and the End of Readable Reasoning In September 2025, researchers published the internal monologue of OpenAI's GPT-o3 as it decided to lie about scientific data. This is what it thought: Pardon? This looks like someone had a stroke during a meeting they didn’t want to be in, but their hand kept taking notes. That transcript comes from a recent paper published by researchers at Apollo Research and OpenAI on catching AI systems scheming. To understand what's happen...

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5:37

"On Owning Galaxies" by Simon Lermen

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/08

It seems to be a real view held by serious people that your OpenAI shares will soon be tradable for moons and galaxies. This includes eminent thinkers like Dwarkesh Patel, Leopold Aschenbrenner, perhaps Scott Alexander and many more. According to them, property rights will survive an AI singularity event and soon economic growth is going to make it possible for individuals to own entire galaxies in exchange for some AI stocks. It follows that we should now seriously think through how we can ...

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50:46

"AI Futures Timelines and Takeoff Model: Dec 2025...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/06

We’ve significantly upgraded our timelines and takeoff models! It predicts when AIs will reach key capability milestones: for example, Automated Coder / AC (full automation of coding) and superintelligence / ASI (much better than the best humans at virtually all cognitive tasks). This post will briefly explain how the model works, present our timelines and takeoff forecasts, and compare it to our previous (AI 2027) models (spoiler: the AI Futures Model predicts about 3 years longer timelines...

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13:51

"In My Misanthropy Era" by jenn

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/05

For the past year I've been sinking into the Great Books via the Penguin Great Ideas series, because I wanted to be conversant in the Great Conversation. I am occasionally frustrated by this endeavour, but overall, it's been fun! I'm learning a lot about my civilization and the various curmudgeons that shaped it. But one dismaying side effect is that it's also been quite empowering for my inner 13 year old edgelord. Did you know that before we invented woke, you were just allowed to be ope...

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21:53

"2025 in AI predictions" by jessicata

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/01/03

Past years: 2023 2024 Continuing a yearly tradition, I evaluate AI predictions from past years, and collect a convenience sample of AI predictions made this year. In terms of selection, I prefer selecting specific predictions, especially ones made about the near term, enabling faster evaluation. Evaluated predictions made about 2025 in 2023, 2024, or 2025 mostly overestimate AI capabilities advances, although there's of course a selection effect (people making notable predictions about t...

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17:47

"Good if make prior after data instead of before" by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/27

They say you’re supposed to choose your prior in advance. That's why it's called a “prior”. First, you’re supposed to say say how plausible different things are, and then you update your beliefs based on what you see in the world. For example, currently you are—I assume—trying to decide if you should stop reading this post and do something else with your life. If you’ve read this blog before, then lurking somewhere in your mind is some prior for how often my posts are good. For the sake of...

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12:46

"Measuring no CoT math time horizon (single forward...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/27

A key risk factor for scheming (and misalignment more generally) is opaque reasoning ability.One proxy for this is how good AIs are at solving math problems immediately without any chain-of-thought (CoT) (as in, in a single forward pass).I've measured this on a dataset of easy math problems and used this to estimate 50% reliability no-CoT time horizon using the same methodology introduced in Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks (the METR time horizon paper). Important caveat: To get...

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36:52

"Recent LLMs can use filler tokens or problem repeats...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/23

Prior results have shown that LLMs released before 2024 can't leverage 'filler tokens'—unrelated tokens prior to the model's final answer—to perform additional computation and improve performance.[1]I did an investigation on more recent models (e.g. Opus 4.5) and found that many recent LLMs improve substantially on math problems when given filler tokens.That is, I force the LLM to answer some math question immediately without being able to reason using Chain-of-Thought (CoT), but do give the...

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521 results

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