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LessWrong posts by zvi

zvi

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi

technology philosophy

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41:01

“Monthly Roundup #37: December 2026” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/12

I’m doing the Monthly Roundup early this month so that next week can be GPT-5.2 and affordability of life week, assuming we are not overtaken by other events.Ban Gain of Function Research The risk-reward profile of creating highly dangerous new viruses, supposedly in order to study them, is abysmal even when things are handled properly. Also, the actual practice of it is completely utterly insane. This below is the kind of thing that could very easily cause a global pandemic vastly worse

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85:25

“AI #146: Chipping In” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/11

It was touch and go, I’m worried GPT-5.2 is going to drop any minute now, but DeepSeek v3.2 was covered on Friday and after that we managed to get through the week without a major model release. Well, okay, also Gemini 3 DeepThink, but we all pretty much know what that offers us.We did have a major chip release, in that the Trump administration unwisely chose to sell H200 chips directly to China. This would, if allowed at scale, allow China to make up a substantial portion of its compute deficit,

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48:20

“Childhood and Education #15: Got To Get Out” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/10

The focus this time around is on the non-academic aspects of primary and secondary school, especially various questions around bullying and discipline, plus an extended rant about someone being wrong on the internet while attacking homeschooling, and the latest on phones.Bullying If your child is being bullied for real, and it's getting quite bad, is this an opportunity to learn to stand up for yourself, become tough and other stuff like that? Mostly no. Actually fighting back effectively

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24:43

“Selling H200s to China Is Unwise and Unpopular” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/09

AI is the most important thing about the future. It is vital to national security. It will be central to economic, military and strategic supremacy.This is true regardless of what other dangers and opportunities AI might present. The good news is that America has many key advantages in AI. America's greatest advantage in AI is our vastly superior access to compute. We are in danger of selling a large portion of that advantage for 30 pieces of silver. This is on track to be done against the

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4:09

“Little Echo” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/08

I believe that we will win. An echo of an old ad for the 2014 US men's World Cup team. It did not win. I was in Berkeley for the 2025 Secular Solstice. We gather to sing and to reflect. The night's theme was the opposite: ‘I don’t think we’re going to make it.’ As in: Sufficiently advanced AI is coming. We don’t know exactly when, or what form it will take, but it is probably coming. When it does, we, humanity, probably won’t make it. It's a live question. Could easily go either way. We are not

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19:30

“DeepSeek v3.2 Is Okay And Cheap But Slow” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/05

DeepSeek v3.2 is DeepSeek's latest open model release with strong bencharks. Its paper contains some technical innovations that drive down cost.It's a good model by the standards of open models, and very good if you care a lot about price and openness, and if you care less about speed or whether the model is Chinese. It is strongest in mathematics. What it does not appear to be is frontier. It is definitely not having a moment. In practice all signs are that it underperforms its benchmarks.

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114:09

“AI #145: You’ve Got Soul” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/04

The cycle of language model releases is, one at least hopes, now complete.OpenAI gave us GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.1-Codex-Max. xAI gave us Grok 4.1. Google DeepMind gave us Gemini 3 Pro and Nana Banana Pro. Anthropic gave us Claude Opus 4.5. It is the best model, sir. Use it whenever you can. One way Opus 4.5 is unique is that it as what it refers to as a ‘soul document.’ Where OpenAI tries to get GPT-5.1 to adhere to its model spec that lays out specific behaviors, Anthropic instead explains to

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39:06

“On Dwarkesh Patel’s Second Interview With Ilya...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/03

Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was very clearly one of those. So here we go.Double click to interact with video As usual for podcast posts, the baseline bullet points describe key points made, and then the nested statements are my commentary. If I am quoting directly I use quote marks, otherwise assume paraphrases. What are the main takeaways? Ilya thinks training in its current form will peter out, that we are

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14:17

“Reward Mismatches in RL Cause Emergent Misalignment”...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/02

Learning to do misaligned-coded things anywhere teaches an AI (or a human) to do misaligned-coded things everywhere. So be sure you never, ever teach any mind to do what it sees, in context, as misaligned-coded things.If the optimal solution (as in, the one you most reinforce) to an RL training problem is one that the model perceives as something you wouldn’t want it to do, it will generally learn to do things you don’t want it to do. You can solve this by ensuring that the misaligned-coded

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44:49

“Claude Opus 4.5 Is The Best Model Available” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/01

Claude Opus 4.5 is the best model currently available.No model since GPT-4 has come close to the level of universal praise that I have seen for Claude Opus 4.5. It is the most intelligent and capable, most aligned and thoughtful model. It is a joy. There are some auxiliary deficits, and areas where other models have specialized, and even with the price cut Opus remains expensive, so it should not be your exclusive model. I do think it should absolutely be your daily driver. Image by

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60:59

Claude Opus 4.5: Model Card, Alignment and Safety

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/28

They saved the best for last.The contrast in model cards is stark. Google provided a brief overview of its tests for Gemini 3 Pro, with a lot of ‘we did this test, and we learned a lot from it, and we are not going to tell you the results.’ Anthropic gives us a 150 page book, including their capability assessments. This makes sense. Capability is directly relevant to safety, and also frontier capability safety tests often also credible indications of capability. Which still has several

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88:32

AI #144: Thanks For the Models

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/27

Thanks for everything. And I do mean everything.Everyone gave us a new model in the last few weeks. OpenAI gave us GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.1-Codex-Max. These are overall improvements, although there are worries around glazing and reintroducing parts of the 4o spirit. xAI gave us Grok 4.1, although few seem to have noticed and I haven’t tried it. Google gave us both by far the best image model in Nana Banana Pro and also Gemini 3 Pro, which is a vast intelligence with no spine. It is extremely

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113:43

The Big Nonprofits Post 2025

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/27

There remain lots of great charitable giving opportunities out there. I have now had three opportunities to be a recommender for the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF). I wrote in detail about my first experience back in 2021, where I struggled to find worthy applications. The second time around in 2024, there was an abundance of worthy causes. In 2025 there were even more high quality applications, many of which were growing beyond our ability to support them. Thus this is the second edition

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113:43

The Big Nonprofits Post 2025

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/26

There remain lots of great charitable giving opportunities out there.I have now had three opportunities to be a recommender for the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF). I wrote in detail about my first experience back in 2021, where I struggled to find worthy applications. The second time around in 2024, there was an abundance of worthy causes. In 2025 there were even more high quality applications, many of which were growing beyond our ability to support them. Thus this is the second edition

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15:35

ChatGPT 5.1 Codex Max

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/25

OpenAI has given us GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, their best coding model for OpenAI Codex.They claim it is faster, more capable and token-efficient and has better persistence on long tasks. It scores 77.9% on SWE-bench-verified, 79.9% on SWE-Lancer-IC SWE and 58.1% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, all substantial gains over GPT-5.1-Codex. It's triggering OpenAI to prepare for being high level in cybersecurity threats. There's a 27 page system card. One could call this the secret ‘real’ GPT-5.1 that matters. They

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58:42

Gemini 3 Pro Is a Vast Intelligence With No Spine

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/24

It's A Great Model, Sir One might even say the best model. It is for now my default weapon of choice. Google's official announcement of Gemini 3 Pro is full of big talk. Google tells us: Welcome to a new era of intelligence. Learn anything. Build anything. Plan anything. An agent-first development experience in Google Antigravity. Gemini Agent for your browser. It's terrific at everything. They even employed OpenAI-style vague posting. In this case, they can (mostly) back up that

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24:42

Gemini 3: Model Card and Safety Framework Report

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/21

Gemini 3 Pro is an excellent model, sir.This is a frontier model release, so we start by analyzing the model card and safety framework report. Then later I’ll look at capabilities. I found the safety framework highly frustrating to read, as it repeatedly ‘hides the football’ and withholds or makes it difficult to understand key information. I do not believe there is a frontier safety problem with Gemini 3, but (to jump ahead, I’ll go into more detail next time) I do think that the model is

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123:46

“AI #143: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/20

Last week had the release of GPT-5.1, which I covered on Tuesday.This week included Gemini 3, Nana Banana Pro, Grok 4.1, GPT 5.1 Pro, GPT 5.1-Codex-Max, Anthropic making a deal with Microsoft and Nvidia, Anthropic disrupting a sophisticated cyberattack operation and what looks like an all-out attack by the White House to force through a full moratorium on and preemption of any state AI laws without any substantive Federal framework proposal. Among other things, such as a very strong general

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70:40

“Monthly Roundup #36: November 2025” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/19

Happy Gemini Week to those who celebrate. Coverage of the new release will begin on Friday. Meanwhile, here's this month's things that don’t go anywhere else.Good News, Everyone Google has partnered with Polymarket to include Polymarket odds into Google Search and Google Finance. This is fantastic and suggests we should expand the number of related markets on Polymarket. In many ways Polymarket prediction markets are remarkably accurate, but here what we have is a Brier Score without a baseline

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24:04

“On Writing #2” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/18

In honor of my dropping by Inkhaven at Lighthaven in Berkeley this week, I figured it was time for another writing roundup. You can find #1 here, from March 2025.I’ll be there from the 17th (the day I am publishing this) until the morning of Saturday the 22nd. I am happy to meet people, including for things not directly about writing. Table of Contents Table of Contents. How I Use AI For Writing These Days. Influencing Influence. Size Matters. Time To Write A Shorter One. A Useful

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