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PODCAST

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

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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5:03

"Turning 20 in the probable pre-apocalypse" by Parv...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/23

Master version of this on https://parvmahajan.com/2025/12/21/turning-20.html I turn 20 in January, and the world looks very strange. Probably, things will change very quickly. Maybe, one of those things is whether or not we’re still here. This moment seems very fragile, and perhaps more than most moments will never happen again. I want to capture a little bit of what it feels like to be alive right now. 1. Everywhere around me there is this incredible sense of freefall and of ...

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20:57

"Alignment Pretraining: AI Discourse Causes...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/23

TL;DR LLMs pretrained on data about misaligned AIs themselves become less aligned. Luckily, pretraining LLMs with synthetic data about good AIs helps them become more aligned. These alignment priors persist through post-training, providing alignment-in-depth. We recommend labs pretrain for alignment, just as they do for capabilities. Website: alignmentpretraining.ai Us: geodesicresearch.org | x.com/geodesresearch Note: We are currently garnering feedback here before submitting to ICML...

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8:29

"Dancing in a World of Horseradish" by lsusr

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/22

Commercial airplane tickets are divided up into coach, business class, and first class. In 2014, Etihad introduced The Residence, a premium experience above first class. The Residence isn't very popular. The reason The Residence isn't very popular is because of economics. A Residence flight is almost as expensive as a private charter jet. Private jets aren't just a little bit better than commercial flights. They're a totally different product. The airplane waits for you, and you don't have...

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5:50

"Contradict my take on OpenPhil’s past AI beliefs" by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/21

At many points now, I've been asked in private for a critique of EA / EA's history / EA's impact and I have ad-libbed statements that I feel guilty about because they have not been subjected to EA critique and refutation. I need to write up my take and let you all try to shoot it down. Before I can or should try to write up that take, I need to fact-check one of my take-central beliefs about how the last couple of decades have gone down. My belief is that the Open Philanthropy Project, EA ...

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15:53

"Opinionated Takes on Meetups Organizing" by jenn

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/21

Screwtape, as the global ACX meetups czar, has to be reasonable and responsible in his advice giving for running meetups. And the advice is great! It is unobjectionably great. I am here to give you more objectionable advice, as another organizer who's run two weekend retreats and a cool hundred rationality meetups over the last two years. As the advice is objectionable (in that, I can see reasonable people disagreeing with it), please read with the appropriate amount of skepticism. Don...

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12:05

"How to game the METR plot" by shash42

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/21

TL;DR: In 2025, we were in the 1-4 hour range, which has only 14 samples in METR's underlying data. The topic of each sample is public, making it easy to game METR horizon length measurements for a frontier lab, sometimes inadvertently. Finally, the “horizon length” under METR's assumptions might be adding little information beyond benchmark accuracy. None of this is to criticize METR—in research, its hard to be perfect on the first release. But I’m tired of what is being inferred from this ...

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20:15

"Activation Oracles: Training and Evaluating LLMs as...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/20

TL;DR: We train LLMs to accept LLM neural activations as inputs and answer arbitrary questions about them in natural language. These Activation Oracles generalize far beyond their training distribution, for example uncovering misalignment or secret knowledge introduced via fine-tuning. Activation Oracles can be improved simply by scaling training data quantity and diversity. The below is a reproduction of our X thread on this paper and the Anthropic Alignment blog post. Thread New pap...

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5:55

"Scientific breakthroughs of the year" by technicalities

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/17

A couple of years ago, Gavin became frustrated with science journalism. No one was pulling together results across fields; the articles usually didn’t link to the original source; they didn't use probabilities (or even report the sample size); they were usually credulous about preliminary findings (“...which species was it tested on?”); and they essentially never gave any sense of the magnitude or the baselines (“how much better is this treatment than the previous best?”). Speculative resu...

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19:04

"A high integrity/epistemics political machine?" by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/17

I have goals that can only be reached via a powerful political machine. Probably a lot of other people around here share them. (Goals include “ensure no powerful dangerous AI get built”, “ensure governance of the US and world are broadly good / not decaying”, “have good civic discourse that plugs into said governance.”) I think it’d be good if there was a powerful rationalist political machine to try to make those things happen. Unfortunately the naive ways of doing that would destroy the ...

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692 results

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