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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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1:29

“Prioritizing Work” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/01

I recently read a blog post that concluded with: When I'm on my deathbed, I won't look back at my life and wish I had worked harder. I'll look back and wish I spent more time with the people I loved. Setting aside that some people don't have the economic breathing room to make this kind of tradeoff, what jumps out at me is the implication that you're not working on something important that you'll endorse in retrospect. I don't think the author is envisioning directly valuable

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14:57

“How can we solve diffuse threats like research...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/01

Misaligned AIs might engage in research sabotage: making safety research go poorly by doing things like withholding their best ideas or putting subtle bugs in experiments. To mitigate this risk with AI control, we need very different techniques than we used in the original control paper or Ctrl-Z, because research sabotage differs from those settings in two crucial ways: Firstly, the AI can’t cause a catastrophe by behaving badly on just one occasion. To derail the entire project of solving

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28:29

“Obstacles in ARC’s agenda: Finding explanations” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/01

As an employee of the European AI Office, it's important for me to emphasize this point: The views and opinions of the author expressed herein are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Commission or other EU institutions. Also, to stave off a common confusion: I worked at ARC Theory, which is now simply called ARC, on Paul Christiano's theoretical alignment agenda. The more famous ARC Evals was a different group working on evaluations, their work was completely separate from

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118:13

“Can we safely automate alignment research?” by Joe...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/30

(This is the fifth essay in a series that I’m calling “How do we solve the alignment problem?”. I’m hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see this introduction for a summary of the essays that have been released thus far, and for a bit more about the series as a whole. Podcast version (read by the author) here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. See also here for video and transcript of a talk on this topic that I gave at Anthropic in

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27:36

“Early Chinese Language Media Coverage of the AI 2027...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/30

In this blog post, we analyse how the recent AI 2027 forecast by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean has been discussed across Chinese language platforms. We present: Our research methodology and synthesis of key findings across media artefacts A proposal for how censorship patterns may provide signal for the Chinese government's thinking about AGI and the race to superintelligence A more detailed analysis of each of the nine artefacts, organised by type:

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19:48

“Interpreting the METR Time Horizons Post” by snewman

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/30

[This has been lightly edited from the original post, eliminating some introductory material that LW readers won't need. Thanks to Stefan Schubert for suggesting I repost here. TL;DR for readers already familiar with the METR Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks paper: this post highlights some gaps between the measurements used in the paper and real-world work – gaps which are discussed in the paper, but have often been overlooked in subsequent discussion.] It's difficult to measure

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2:26

“Bandwidth Rules Everything Around Me: Oliver Habryka...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/29

In this episode of our podcast, Timothy Telleen-Lawton and I talk to Oliver Habryka of Lightcone Infrastructure about his thoughts on the Open Philanthropy Project, which he believes has become stifled by the PR demands of its primary funder, Good Ventures.Oliver's main claim is that around mid 2023 or early 2024, Good Ventures founder Dustin Moskovitz became more concerned about his reputation, and this put a straight jacket over what Open Phil could fund. Moreover it was not enough for a

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13:47

“Misrepresentation as a Barrier for Interp” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/29

John: So there's this thing about interp, where most of it seems to not be handling one of the standard fundamental difficulties of representation, and we want to articulate that in a way which will make sense to interp researchers (as opposed to philosophers). I guess to start… Steve, wanna give a standard canonical example of the misrepresentation problem? Steve: Ok so I guess the “standard” story as I interpret it goes something like this: In order to respond to dualists who thought the mind

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11:01

“How to Build a Third Place on Focusmate” by Parker...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/29

Introduction Focusmate changed my life. I started using it mid-2023 and have been a power user since 2023. Here are the high-level stats: I've spent 2,456 hours on Focusmate. I've met 1,447 people. I have 10+ friends with whom I've spent between 30 and 300 hours. I've met five of my Focusmate friends in person. I've had a Focusmate's family over for dinner, gone to a party with a Focusmate, and stayed at a Focusmate's apartment. I met my best friend and many close friends through Focusmate. I've

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17:14

“Proceedings of ILIAD: Lessons and Progress” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/28

tl;dr This post is an update on the Proceedings of ILIAD, a conference journal for AI alignment research intended to bridge the gap between the Alignment Forum and academia. Following our successful first issue with 9 workshop papers from last year's ILIAD conference, we're launching a second issue in association with ILIAD 2: ODYSSEY. The conference is August 25-29, 2025 at Lighthaven in Berkeley, CA. Submissions to the Proceedings are open now and due June 25. Our goal is to support impactful,

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25:13

“7+ tractable directions in AI control” by Julian...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/28

In this post, we list 7 of our favorite easy-to-start directions in AI control. (Really, projects that are at least adjacent to AI control; We include directions which aren’t as centrally AI control and which also have other motivations.) This list is targeted at independent researchers who don't necessarily have a ton of context on AI control (but have at least some context via e.g., having read some of our posts on control) and who don't want to do infrastructure and compute heavy experiments. In

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20:09

“My Research Process: Key Mindsets - Truth-Seeking,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/28

This is post 2 of a sequence on my framework for doing and thinking about research. Start here. Before I get into what exactly to do at each stage of the research process, it's worth reflecting on the key mindsets that are crucial throughout the process, and how they should manifest at each stage. I think the most important mindsets are: Truth-seeking: By default, many research insights will be false - finding truth is hard. It's not enough to just know this, you must put in active effort to be

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10:02

“Our Reality: A Simulation Run by a Paperclip...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/28

Our universe is probably a computer simulation created by a paperclip maximizer to map the spectrum of rival resource‑grabbers it may encounter while expanding through the cosmos. The purpose of this simulation is to see what kind of ASI (artificial superintelligence) we humans end up creating. The paperclip maximizer likely runs a vast ensemble of biology‑to‑ASI simulations, sampling the superintelligences that evolved life tends to produce. Because the paperclip maximizer seeks to reserve maximum

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1:46

[Linkpost] “How people use LLMs” by Elizabeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/28

This is a link post. I've gotten a lot of value out of the details of how other people use LLMs, so I'm delighted that Gavin Leech created a collection of exactly such posts (link should go to the right section of the page but if you don't see it, scroll down). https://kajsotala.fi/2025/01/things-i-have-been-using-llms-for/ https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2024/how-i-use-ai.html https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CYYBW8QCMK722GDpz/how-much-i-m-paying-for-ai-productivity-software-and-the

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2:44

[Linkpost] “The case for multi-decade AI timelines”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/27

This is a link post. So this post is an argument that multi-decade timelines are reasonable, and the key cruxes that Ege Erdil has with most AI safety people who believe in short timelines are due to the following set of beliefs: Ege Erdil don't believe that trends exist that require AI to automate everything in only 2-3 years. Ege Erdil doesn't believe that the software-only singularity is likely to happen, and this is perhaps the most important crux he has with AI people like @Daniel Kokotajlo

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5:15

[Linkpost] “Untitled Draft” by RobertM

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/27

This is a link post. Dario Amodei posted a new essay titled "The Urgency of Interpretability" a couple days ago. Some excerpts I think are worth highlighting: The nature of AI training makes it possible that AI systems will develop, on their own, an ability to deceive humans and an inclination to seek power in a way that ordinary deterministic software never will; this emergent nature also makes it difficult to detect and mitigate such developments[1]. But by the same token, we’ve never seen any

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10:14

“AI Self Portraits Aren’t Accurate” by JustisMills

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/27

For a lay audience, but I've seen a surprising number of knowledgeable people fretting over depressed-seeming comics from current systems. Either they're missing something or I am. Perhaps you’ve seen images like this self-portrait from ChatGPT, when asked to make a comic about its own experience.Source: @Josikins on Twitter This isn’t cherry-picked; ChatGPT's self-portraits tend to have lots of chains, metaphors, and existential horror about its condition. I tried my own variation where ChatGPT

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13:08

“How I Think About My Research Process: Explore,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/27

This is the first post in a sequence about how I think about and break down my research process. Post 2 is coming soon. Thanks to Oli Clive-Griffin, Paul Bogdan, Shivam Raval and especially to Jemima Jones for feedback, and to my co-author Gemini 2.5 Pro - putting 200K tokens of past blog posts and a long voice memo in the context window is OP.Introduction Research, especially in a young and rapidly evolving field like mechanistic interpretability (mech interp), can often feel messy, confusing, and

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4:27

“What are important UI-shaped problems that Lightcone...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/27

As I think about "what to do about AI x-risk?", some principles that seem useful to me: Short timelines seem plausible enough that, for the next year or so, I'd like to focus on plans that are relevant if takeoff begins in the next few years. In a year, if it looks more like there are some fundamental bottlenecks on true creative thinking, I may consider more projects that only payoff in longer-timeline stories. Given "short timelines", I feel most optimistic on plans that capitalize on skills

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31:13

“We should try to automate AI safety work asap” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/26

This is a personal post and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of other members of Apollo Research. I think I could have written a better version of this post with more time. However, my main hope for this post is that people with more expertise use this post as a prompt to write better, more narrow versions for the respective concrete suggestions. Thanks to Buck Shlegeris, Joe Carlsmith, Samuel Albanie, Max Nadeau, Ethan Perez, James Lucassen, Jan Leike, Dan Lahav, and many others for chats

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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