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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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22:12

“AI Craziness Mitigation Efforts” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

AI chatbots in general, and OpenAI and ChatGPT and especially GPT-4o the absurd sycophant in particular, have long had a problem with issues around mental health. I covered various related issues last month. This post is an opportunity to collect links to previous coverage in the first section, and go into the weeds on some new events in the later sections. A lot of you should likely skip most of the in-the-weeds discussions. What Are The Problems There are a few distinct phenomena we have

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15:43

“When Will AI Transform the Economy?” by Andre.Infante

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

Substack version here: https://andreinfante.substack.com/p/when-will-ai-transform-the-economy A caricature of a common Twitter argument: ”Hey it seems like language models can do a lot of humanlike cognitive tasks, look at this impressive example! That seems like something that would transform the economy.” “Well, smart guy, these things have been out for a couple of years now. Why isn’t the economy transformed yet?” This does strike me as a little bit mysterious. The models can do impressive

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14:05

“Some data from LeelaPieceOdds” by Jeremy Gillen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

I've been curious about how good LeelaPieceOdds is, so I downloaded a bunch of data and graphed it. For context, Leela is a chess bot and this version of it has been trained to play with a handicap.This is BBNN odds, meaning Leela starts without bishops and knights. I first heard about LeelaQueenOdds from simplegeometry's comment, and I've been playing against it occasionally since then. LeelaPieceOdds is the version with more varied handicap options, which is more interesting to me because

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3:59

“Workshop on Post-AGI Economics, Culture, and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

This is an announcement and call for applications to the Workshop on Post-AGI Economics, Culture, and Governance taking place in San Diego on Wednesday, December 3, overlapping with the first day of NeurIPS 2025. This workshop aims to bring together a diverse range of expertise to deepen our collective understanding of how the world might evolve after the development of AGI, and what we can do about it now. The draft program features: Anton Korinek on the Economics of Transformative AI Alex

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1:56

“Introducing the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI)” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

We at Epoch AI have recently released a new composite AI capability index called the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI), based on nearly 40 underlying benchmarks. Some key features... Saturation-proof: ECI "stitches" benchmarks together, to enable comparisons even as individual benchmarks become saturated. Global comparisons: Models can be compared, even if they were never evaluated on the same benchmarks. Difficulty-based task weighting: ECI uses a simple statistical model (similar to those used in

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15:56

“Mottes and Baileys in AI discourse” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

This post kinda necessarily needs to touch multiple political topics at once. Please, everyone, be careful. If it looks like you haven't read the LessWrong Political Prerequisites, I'm more likely than usual to delete your comments. I think some people are (rightly) worried about a few flavors of Motte and Baily-ing with the IABIED discourse, and more recently, with the Superintelligence Statement. With IABIED: "Sure, the motte is 'If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an

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9:04

“LLM robots can’t pass butter (and they are having an...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

TLDR: Andon Labs, evaluates AI in the real world to measure capabilities and to see what can go wrong. For example, we previously made LLMs operate vending machines, and now we're testing if they can control robots at offices. There are two parts to this test: We deploy LLM-controlled robots in our office and track how well they perform at being helpful. We systematically test the robots on tasks in our office. We benchmark different LLMs against each other. You can read our paper "Butter-Bench"

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21:28

“The Memetics of AI Successionism” by Jan_Kulveit

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/28

TL;DR: AI progress and the recognition of associated risks are painful to think about. This cognitive dissonance acts as fertile ground in the memetic landscape, a high-energy state that will be exploited by novel ideologies. We can anticipate cultural evolution will find viable successionist ideologies: memeplexes that resolve this tension by framing the replacement of humanity by AI not as a catastrophe, but as some combination of desirable, heroic, or inevitable outcome. This post mostly

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31:57

“All the lab’s AI safety Plans: 2025 edition” by Algon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/28

Three out of three CEOs of top AI companies agree: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority." How do they plan to do this? Anthropic has a Responsible Scaling Policy, Google DeepMind has a Frontier Safety Framework, and OpenAI has a Preparedness Framework, all of which were updated in 2025. Overview of the policies All three policies have similar “bones”.[1] They: Take the same high-level approach: the company promises to test its AIs for dangerous capabilities

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8:52

“life lessons from trading” by thiccythot

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/28

crossposted from my substack 1) Traders get paid to guess where money will move. 2) There are many ways people win guessing games: Some people read new information quickly Some people send guesses quickly Some people process new information accurately Some people recognize patterns quickly Some people see patterns other's don’t see Some people read what other people are guessing accurately Some have networks that gossip about what the money will do. Some chase money where others cannot, will not,

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5:57

“Stability of natural latents in information...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

Audio note: this article contains 32 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 is a comment on Natural Latents: Latent Variables Stable Across Ontologies by John Wentworth and David Lorell. It assumes some familiarity with that work and does not attempt to explain it. Instead, I present an alternative proof that was developed as an exercise to aid my own understanding. While the original theorem

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6:35

“AIs should also refuse to work on capabilities...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

There's a strong argument that humans should stop trying to build more capable AI systems, or at least slow down progress. The risks are plausibly large but unclear, and we’d prefer not to die. But the roadmaps of the companies pursuing these systems envision increasingly agentic AI systems taking over the key tasks of researching and building superhuman AI systems, and humans will therefore have a decreasing ability to make many key decisions. In the near term, humanity could stop, but seem likely

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15:35

“FWIW: What I noticed at a (Goenka) Vipassana...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

tl;dr: I went to a typical 10-day Vipassana Center retreat. I had some hopes going in for what I might get out of it and those were mostly fulfilled. I had some worries that it might be creepy, icky, cringe, or in some other way awful, and for the most part it wasn’t. I’m glad I went, but on the other hand am in no great hurry to return. There are Vipassana Centers all over the world that teach a standardized meditation regimen designed by S.N. Goenka. Their retreats are offered on a

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23:55

“Cancer has a surprising amount of detail” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

There is a very famous essay titled ‘Reality has a surprising amount of detail’. The thesis of the article is that reality is filled, just filled, with an incomprehensible amount of materially important information, far more than most people would naively expect. Some of this detail is inherent in the physical structure of the universe, and the rest of it has been generated by centuries of passionate humans imbibing the subject with idiosyncratic convention. In either case, the detail is very, very

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6:18

“Credit goes to the presenter, not the inventor” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

VN: Hey M, you come up with a name for the architecture yet? M: No, we've been busy. VN: Buddy, it takes all of 5 seconds to come up with a name. M: Maybe for you! But for use mere mortals, it takes forever. E, I and the rest of the guys just can't settle on one. I don't see why you keep insisting the name's got to be short and sweet anyhow. Can't you just call it a report on computer architecture or something? VN: That's the worst name! Look, let me explain what I'm worried about, and perhaps

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142:22

“On Fleshling Safety: A Debate by Klurl and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

(23K words; best considered as nonfiction with a fictional-dialogue frame, not a proper short story.) Prologue: Klurl and Trapaucius were members of the machine race. And no ordinary citizens they, but Constructors: licensed, bonded, and insured; proven, experienced, and reputed. Together Klurl and Trapaucius had collaborated on such famed artifices as the Eternal Clock, Silicon Sphere, Wandering Flame, and Diamond Book; and as individuals, both had constructed wonders too numerous to number. At

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6:54

“Brightline is Actually Pretty Dangerous” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/26

Per the Atlantic's A 'Death Train' is Haunting South Florida: According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people—none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves. By comparison, the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter line in the country, hit and

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8:43

“Seven-ish Words from My Thought-Language” by Lorxus

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/26

(With thanks to @TsviBT, @Lucie Philippon, and @johnswentworth for encouragement and feedback, among many.) Seven entries from a dictionary that will never exist, even though it should. The words in [brackets] show up with some frequency in my thoughts, and I struggle with English's semantic poverty. Some of them show up in other languages, like Korean or Lojban. Others among them, people I’ve spoken to share in wishing were wider-used words. [untranslatable 1: word-clogged/interference-silent]

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18:15

“Origins and dangers of future AI capability denial”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/25

In rationalist spheres, there's a fairly clear consensus that whatever AI's ultimate impact will be, it is at its core a capable technology that will have very large effects on the world. In the "general public" sphere, things are very different. There's a less clear but real consensus that AI's ultimate impact will be negative, and not much agreement on the capability of AI as a technology. I think it's very plausible that this could go the opposite way of rationalists, into a disbelief in the

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10:56

“Beliefs about formal methods and AI safety” by Quinn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/25

I appreciate Theodore Ehrenborg's comments. As a wee lad, I heard about mathematical certainty of computer programs. Let's go over what I currently believe and don’t believe. First: what is formal verification Sometimes you get pwned because of the spec-implementation gap. The computer did not do what it should’ve done. Other times, you get pwned by the world-spec gap. The computer wasn’t wrong, your “shoulds” were. Expanding the domain of compiletime knowledge A compiler tells you the problem

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