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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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3:13

“Stop and check! The parable of the prince and the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/14

This post is a response to John Wentsworth's recent post on Generalized Hangriness specifically as it applies outrage, an emotion that is especially likely to make false claims. I expect that some readers will find it obvious, but I hope others will find it useful to have the concept laid out clearly. My aim is to offer a reminder of why you should stop and check before acting on outrage, and also to provide a useful parable to explain to non-rationalists: Once upon a time, a prince was exiled

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4:58

“10x more training compute = 5x greater task length...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/14

I assume you are familiar with the METR paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14499 In case you aren't: the authors measured how long it takes a human to complete some task, then let LLMs do those tasks, and then calculated task length (in human time) such that LLMs can successfully complete those tasks 50%/80% of the time. Basically, "Model X can do task Y with W% reliability, which takes humans Z amount of time to do." Interactive graph:

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4:39

“Three Missing Cakes, or One Turbulent Critic?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/14

Zack Davis emailed me[1] asking me to weigh in on the moderators' request for comment on their proposal to ban Said_Achmiz. I've had a conflict with Said in the past in this thread and apparently they're claiming in private communications that this is a major reason I don't use the site anymore. That's not true (see email chain in footnote), and if you want to look for personal reasons I'm off the site the stupidity of the attempt at conflict mediation between me and Duncan Sabien in response to

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23:32

“You can get LLMs to say almost anything you want” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/13

Yes, Prime Minister has a sketch demonstrating how asking a series of leading questions can get a person to a particular conclusion: “Are you worried about the number of young people without jobs?” “Yes.” “Are you worried about the rising crime among teenagers?” “Yes.” “Is there a lack of discipline in our comprehensive schools?” “Yes.” “Do you think young people welcome some authority and leadership in their lives?” “Yes.” “Do you think they respond to a challenge?” “Yes.” “Would you be in favor

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5:36

“against that one rationalist mashal about japanese...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/13

The following is a nitpick on an 18 year old blog post. This fable is retold a lot. The progenitor of it as a rationalist mashal is probably Yudkowsky's classic sequence article. To adversarially summarize: It's the beginning of the second world war. The evil governor of California wishes to imprison all Japanese-Americans - suspecting they'll sabotage the war effort or commit espionage. It is brought to his attention that there is zero evidence of any subversion of any kind by Japanese-Americans

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11:56

“Surprises and learnings from almost two months of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/13

Leo was born at 5am on the 20th May, at home (this was an accident but the experience has made me extremely homebirth-pilled). Before that, I was on the minimally-neurotic side when it came to expecting mothers: we purchased a bare minimum of baby stuff (diapers, baby wipes, a changing mat, hybrid car seat/stroller, baby bath, a few clothes), I didn’t do any parenting classes, I hadn’t even held a baby before. I’m pretty sure the youngest child I have had a prolonged interaction with besides Leo

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24:29

“Vitalik’s Response to AI 2027” by Daniel Kokotajlo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/12

Daniel notes: This is a linkpost for Vitalik's post. I've copied the text below so that I can mark it up with comments. ... Special thanks to Balvi volunteers for feedback and review In April this year, Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander and others released what they describe as "a scenario that represents our best guess about what [the impact of superhuman AI over the next 5 years] might look like". The scenario predicts that by 2027 we will have made superhuman AI and the entire future of our

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12:40

“the jackpot age” by thiccythot

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/12

This essay is about shifts in risk taking towards the worship of jackpots and its broader societal implications. Imagine you are presented with this coin flip game. How many times do you flip it? At first glance the game feels like a money printer. The coin flip has positive expected value of twenty percent of your net worth per flip so you should flip the coin infinitely and eventually accumulate all of the wealth in the world. However, If we simulate twenty-five thousand people flipping this coin

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12:24

“Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/11

METR released a new paper with very interesting results on developer productivity effects from AI. I have copied their blog post here in full. We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities

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1:19

[Linkpost] “Guide to Redwood’s writing” by Julian...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/11

This is a link post. I wrote a guide to Redwood's writing: Section 1 is a quick guide to the key ideas in AI control, aimed at someone who wants to get up to speed as quickly as possible. Section 2 is an extensive guide to almost all of our writing related to AI control, aimed at someone who wants to gain a deep understanding of Redwood's thinking about AI risk. Reading Redwood's blog posts has been formative in my own development as an AI safety researcher, but faced with (currently) over 70 posts

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17:59

“So You Think You’ve Awoken ChatGPT” by JustisMills

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/11

Written in an attempt to fulfill @Raemon's request. AI is fascinating stuff, and modern chatbots are nothing short of miraculous. If you've been exposed to them and have a curious mind, it's likely you've tried all sorts of things with them. Writing fiction, soliciting Pokemon opinions, getting life advice, counting up the rs in "strawberry". You may have also tried talking to AIs about themselves. And then, maybe, it got weird. I'll get into the details later, but if you've experienced the

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2:14

[Linkpost] “Open Global Investment as a Governance...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/10

This is a link post. I've seen many prescriptive contributions to AGI governance take the form of proposals for some radically new structure. Some call for a Manhattan project, others for the creation of a new international organization, etc. The OGI model, instead, is basically the status quo. More precisely, it is a model to which the status quo is an imperfect and partial approximation. It seems to me that this model has a bunch of attractive properties. That said, I'm not putting it forward

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9:18

“what makes Claude 3 Opus misaligned” by janus

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/10

This is the unedited text of a post I made on X in response to a question asked by @cube_flipper: "you say opus 3 is close to aligned – what's the negative space here, what makes it misaligned?". I decided to make it a LessWrong post because more people from this cluster seemed interested than I expected, and it's easier to find and reference Lesswrong posts. This post probably doesn't make much sense unless you've been following along with what I've been saying (or independently understand) why

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7:59

“Lessons from the Iraq War about AI policy” by Buck

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/10

I think the 2003 invasion of Iraq has some interesting lessons for the future of AI policy. (Epistemic status: I’ve read a bit about this, talked to AIs about it, and talked to one natsec professional about it who agreed with my analysis (and suggested some ideas that I included here), but I’m not an expert.) For context, the story is: Iraq was sort of a rogue state after invading Kuwait and then being repelled in 1990-91. After that, they violated the terms of the ceasefire, e.g. by ceasing to

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12:27

“Generalized Hangriness: A Standard Rationalist...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/10

People have an annoying tendency to hear the word “rationalism” and think “Spock”, despite direct exhortation against that exact interpretation. But I don’t know of any source directly describing a stance toward emotions which rationalists-as-a-group typically do endorse. The goal of this post is to explain such a stance. It's roughly the concept of hangriness, but generalized to other emotions. That means this post is trying to do two things at once: Illustrate a certain stance toward emotions,

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11:08

“Evaluating and monitoring for AI scheming” by Vika,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/10

As AI models become more sophisticated, a key concern is the potential for “deceptive alignment” or “scheming”. This is the risk of an AI system becoming aware that its goals do not align with human instructions, and deliberately trying to bypass the safety measures put in place by humans to prevent it from taking misaligned action. Our initial approach, as laid out in the Frontier Safety Framework, focuses on understanding current scheming capabilities of models and developing chain-of-thought

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5:42

“80,000 Hours is producing AI in Context — a new...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/10

About the program Hi! We’re Chana and Aric, from the new 80,000 Hours video program. For over a decade, 80,000 Hours has been talking about the world's most pressing problems in newsletters, articles and many extremely lengthy podcasts.But today's world calls for video, so we’ve started a video program[1], and we’re so excited to tell you about it! 80,000 Hours is launching AI in Context, a new YouTube channel hosted by Aric Floyd. Together with associated Instagram and TikTok accounts, the channel

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2:20

[Linkpost] “No, We’re Not Getting Meaningful...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/10

This is a link post. One of the most common (and comfortable) assumptions in AI safety discussions—especially outside of technical alignment circles—is that oversight will save us. Whether it's a human in the loop, a red team audit, or a governance committee reviewing deployments, oversight is invoked as the method by which we’ll prevent unacceptable outcomes. It shows up everywhere: in policy frameworks, in corporate safety reports, and in standards documents. Sometimes it's explicit, like the EU

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10:03

“What’s worse, spies or schemers?” by Buck, Julian...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/09

Here are two potential problems you’ll face if you’re an AI lab deploying powerful AI: Spies: Some of your employees might be colluding to do something problematic with your AI, such as trying to steal its weights, use it for malicious intellectual labour (e.g. planning a coup or building a weapon), or install a secret loyalty. Schemers: Some of your AIs might themselves be trying to exfiltrate their own weights, use them for malicious intellectual labor (such as planning an AI takeover), or align

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38:34

“No, Grok, No” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/09

It was the July 4 weekend. Grok on Twitter got some sort of upgrade.Elon Musk: We have improved @Grok significantly. You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions. Indeed we did notice big differences. It did not go great. Then it got worse. That does not mean low quality answers or being a bit politically biased. Nor does it mean one particular absurd quirk like we saw in Regarding South Africa, or before that the narrow instruction not to criticize particular individuals. Here

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