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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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1:04

[Linkpost] “Project Vend: Can Claude run a small...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/30

This is a link post. Anthropic (post June 27th): We let Claude [Sonnet 3.7] manage an automated store in our office as a small business for about a month. We learned a lot from how close it was to success—and the curious ways that it failed—about the plausible, strange, not-too-distant future in which AI models are autonomously running things in the real economy. But the AI make numerous business-critical errors including repeatedly selling products at a loss, offering excessive discounts, and

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20:28

“Paradigms for computation” by Cole Wyeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/30

Epistemic status: Though I can't find it now, I remember reading a lesswrong post asking "what is your totalizing worldview?" I think this post gets at my answer; in fact, I initially intended to title it "My totalizing worldview" but decided on a slightly more restricted scope (anyway, I tend to change important aspects of my worldview so frequently it's a little unsettling, so I'm not sure if it can be called totalizing). Still, I think these ideas underlie some of the cruxes behind my

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9:17

“life lessons from poker” by thiccythot

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/30

crossposted from my blog There are two ways we miscalibrate risk. We risk too much on things that are low conviction We risk too little on things that are high conviction I learned these lessons in poker and in trading and they have helped me reason about broader life. I call them the fold pre principle and the pocket ace principle. the fold pre principle On poker forums there's a running gag. Whenever someone posts a complicated hand history and asks, “What should I have done here?” the top reply

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37:38

“Circuits in Superposition 2: Now with Less Wrong...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/30

Audio note: this article contains 323 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Summary & Motivation This post is a continuation and clarification of Circuits in Superposition: Compressing many small neural networks into one. That post presented a sketch of a general mathematical framework for compressing different circuits into a network in superposition. On closer inspection, some of it turned out to

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5:34

“I underestimated safety research speedups from safe...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/30

A year or so ago, I thought that 10x speedups in safety research would require AIs so capable that takeover risks would be very high. 2-3x gains seemed plausible, 10x seemed unlikely. I no longer think this. What changed? I continue to think that AI x-risk research is predominantly bottlenecked on good ideas, but I suffered from a failure of imagination of the speedups that could be gained from AIs that are unable to produce great high-level ideas. I’ve realised that humans trying to get empirical

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0:28

“Conciseness Manifesto” by Vasyl Dotsenko

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/29

This page is intentionally left blank ---First published: June 29th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Xo5upyd6x53qgLZqL/conciseness-manifesto --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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7:04

“Support for bedrock liberal principles seems to be...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/29

By 'bedrock liberal principles', I mean things like: respect for individual liberties and property rights, respect for the rule of law and equal treatment under the law, and a widespread / consensus belief that authority and legitimacy of the state derive from the consent of the governed. Note that "consent of the governed" is distinct from simple democracy / majoritarianism: a 90% majority that uses state power to take all the stuff of the other 10% might be democratic but isn't particularly

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0:43

[Linkpost] “A Depressed Shrink Tries Shrooms” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/29

This is a link post. This is a first-person account from a psychiatry resident (me) enrolling in a clinical trial of psilocybin. Somewhere between a trip report, an overview of the pharmacology of psilocybin, and a review of the clinical evidence suggesting pronounced benefits for depression. --- First published: June 28th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/js7A9exEKuErgH6Ma/a-depressed-shrink-tries-shrooms Linkpost

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2:01

[Linkpost] “[Paper] Stochastic Parameter...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/28

This is a link post. Abstract A key step in reverse engineering neural networks is to decompose them into simpler parts that can be studied in relative isolation. Linear parameter decomposition— a framework that has been proposed to resolve several issues with current decomposition methods—decomposes neural network parameters into a sum of sparsely used vectors in parameter space. However, the current main method in this framework, Attribution-based Parameter Decomposition (APD), is impractical on

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5:20

“Proposal for making credible commitments to AIs.” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/28

Acknowledgments: The core scheme here was suggested by Prof. Gabriel Weil. There has been growing interest in the deal-making agenda: humans make deals with AIs (misaligned but lacking decisive strategic advantage) where they promise to be safe and useful for some fixed term (e.g. 2026-2028) and we promise to compensate them in the future, conditional on (i) verifying the AIs were compliant, and (ii) verifying the AIs would spend the resources in an acceptable way.[1] I think the deal-making agenda

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15:03

“Epoch: What is Epoch?” by Zach Stein-Perlman

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/27

Our director explains Epoch AI's mission and how we decide our priorities. In short, we work on projects to understand the trajectory of AI, share this knowledge publicly, and inform important decisions about AI. Since we started Epoch three years ago, we have engaged in hundreds of projects and achieved a wide audience. Yet, one question I often get asked is, ‘What is Epoch?’ In a way, this is an easy question to answer. We are a nonprofit research organization with the mission of improving

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2:10

“Recent and forecasted rates of software and hardware...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/27

I originally wrote this just for myself but thought I'd share it in case others find it useful. Sharing rough notes in the spirit of not letting perfect be the enemy of the good. This was written in early May 2025. In this post I collect evidence and forecasts regarding recent and future trends in software and compute progress. I also make my own forecasts which inform an updated version of AI 2027's timelines forecast (more to come on these and further updates). These forecasts are rough and

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13:41

“Jankily controlling superintelligence” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/27

When discussing AI control, we often talk about levels of AI capabilities where we think control can probably greatly lower risks and where we can probably estimate risks. However, I think it's plausible that an important application of control is modestly improving our odds of surviving significantly superhuman systems which are misaligned. This won't involve any real certainty, it would only moderately reduce risk (if it reduces risk at all), and it may only help with avoiding immediate loss of

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1:51

“Help the AI 2027 team make an online AGI wargame” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/27

The AI Futures Project, the team behind AI 2027, has developed a tabletop exercise (TTX) to simulate AI takeoff where we facilitate people going through an AI 2027-like scenario with different people taking different roles, like POTUS, China, or the frontier AI company CEO. Reviews have been positive and people have found it useful for building their own models of how AI will go. We’re interested in developing an online version of this game, with the goal of eventually getting millions of people to

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14:51

“A Guide For LLM-Assisted Web Research” by nikos,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/27

It's hard to imagine doing web research without using LLMs. Chatbots may be the first thing you turn to for questions like: What are the companies currently working on nuclear fusion and who invested in them? What is the performance gap between open and closed-weight models on the MMLU benchmark? Is there really a Tesla Model H? So which LLMs, and which "Search", "Research", "Deep Search" or "Deep Research" branded products, are best? How good are their epistemics, compared to if you did the web

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1:39

“If Not Now, When?” by Yair Halberstadt

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/27

Hillel... would say: "If I am not for me, who will be for me? And If I am just for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?" Pirkei Avot 1,14 That last question has usually been interpreted as a rhetorical one. If you're not going to do it now, you'll never get around to it! But this is clearly a bad principle to live by. If you start cooking too early, the food will be cold when you want to eat it. If you pick a fruit before it's ripe it will be sour. When you are exhausted the quality of your

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10:13

“A case for courage, when speaking of AI danger” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/27

I think more people should say what they actually believe about AI dangers, loudly and often. Even if you work in AI policy. I’ve been beating this drum for a few years now. I have a whole spiel about how your conversation-partner will react very differently if you share your concerns while feeling ashamed about them versus if you share your concerns as if they’re obvious and sensible, because humans are very good at picking up on your social cues. If you act as if it's shameful to believe AI will

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31:58

“The Industrial Explosion” by rosehadshar, Tom Davidson

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/26

Summary To quickly transform the world, it's not enough for AI to become super smart (the "intelligence explosion"). AI will also have to turbocharge the physical world (the "industrial explosion"). Think robot factories building more and better robot factories, which build more and better robot factories, and so on. The dynamics of the industrial explosion has gotten remarkably little attention. This post lays out how the industrial explosion could play out, and how quickly it might happen. We

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45:08

“Summary of John Halstead’s Book-Length Report on...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/26

1 Introduction (Crossposted from my blog--formatting is better there). Very large numbers of people seem to think that climate change is likely to end the world. Biden and Harris both called it an existential threat. AOC warned a few years ago that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Thunberg once approvingly cited a supposed “top climate scientist” making the claim that “climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next

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3:59

“Tech for Thinking” by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/26

Midjourney, “tech for thinking, artificial intelligence, networks, noosphere, self-organizing decentralized knowledge, library of the future, collective intelligence” My post on Neutrality was kind of abstract, and I think it's time to do a follow-up that's more concrete. Specifically, the place where I think there's something to be done is in information technology, and the ways it shapes the perceived “world”. One way of looking at this: we had the institutional media era in the 20th century

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