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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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8:10

“Worries About AI Are Usually Complements Not...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/26

A common claim is that concern about [X] ‘distracts’ from concern about [Y]. This is often used as an attack to cause people to discard [X] concerns, on pain of being enemies of [Y] concerns, as attention and effort are presumed to be zero-sum.There are cases where there is limited focus, especially in political contexts, or where arguments or concerns are interpreted perversely. A central example is when you site [ABCDE] then they’ll find what they consider the weakest one and only consider or

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9:59

“Token and Taboo” by Guive

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/25

What in retrospect seem like serious moral crimes were often widely accepted while they were happening. This means that moral progress can require intellectual progress.[1] Intellectual progress often requires questioning received ideas, but questioning moral norms is sometimes taboo. For example, in ancient Greece it would have been taboo to say that women should have the same political rights as men. So questioning moral taboos can be an important sub-skill of moral reasoning. Production language

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26:15

“Reward hacking is becoming more sophisticated and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/25

Something's changed about reward hacking in recent systems. In the past, reward hacks were usually accidents, found by non-general, RL-trained systems. Models would randomly explore different behaviors and would sometimes come across undesired behaviors that achieved high rewards[1]. These hacks were usually either simple or took a long time for the model to learn. But we’ve seen a different pattern emerge in frontier models over the past year. Instead of stumbling into reward hacks by accident,

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5:41

“The Intelligence Curse: an essay series” by L Rudolf...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/24

We've published an essay series on what we call the intelligence curse. Most content is brand new, and all previous writing has been heavily reworked. Visit intelligence-curse.ai for the full series. Below is the introduction and table of contents. Art byNomads & Vagabonds. We will soon live in the intelligence age. What you do with that information will determine your place in history. The imminent arrival of AGI has pushed many to try to seize the levers of power as quickly as possible,

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5:18

[Linkpost] “Modifying LLM Beliefs with Synthetic...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/24

This is a link post. In this post, we study whether we can modify an LLM's beliefs and investigate whether doing so could decrease risk from advanced AI systems. We describe a pipeline for modifying LLM beliefs via synthetic document finetuning and introduce a suite of evaluations that suggest our pipeline succeeds in inserting all but the most implausible beliefs. We also demonstrate proof-of-concept applications to honeypotting for detecting model misalignment and unlearning. Introduction: Large

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43:49

“‘The Era of Experience’ has an unsolved technical...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/24

Every now and then, some AI luminaries (1) propose that the future of powerful AI will be reinforcement learning agents—an algorithm class that in many ways has more in common with MuZero (2019)than with LLMs; and (2) propose that the technical problem of making these powerful future AIs follow human commands and/or care about human welfare—as opposed to, y’know, the Terminatorthing—is a straightforward problem that they already know how to solve, at least in broad outline. I agree with (1) and

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2:50

[Linkpost] “My Favorite Productivity Blog Posts” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/24

This is a link post. I’ve read at least a few hundred blog posts, maybe upwards of a thousand. Agreeing with Gavin Leech, I believe I’ve gained from essays more than any other medium. I’m an intellectually curious college student with a strong interest in both the practical and philosophical. This blog post provides a snippet into the most valuable blog posts I’ve read on the topic of productivity. I encourage you to scan what I’ve gotten valuable out of the blog posts and read deeper if

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18:53

“OpenAI Alums, Nobel Laureates Urge Regulators to...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/24

Converting to a for-profit model would undermine the company's founding mission to ensure AGI "benefits all of humanity," argues new letter This is the full text of a post from Obsolete, a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to Build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work. Don’t become

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4:15

“Putting up Bumpers” by Sam Bowman

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/23

tl;dr: Even if we can't solve alignment, we can solve the problem of catching and fixing misalignment. If a child is bowling for the first time, and they just aim at the pins and throw, they’re almost certain to miss. Their ball will fall into one of the gutters. But if there were beginners’ bumpers in place blocking much of the length of those gutters, their throw would be almost certain to hit at least a few pins. This essay describes an alignment strategy for early AGI systems I call ‘putting

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1:18

[Linkpost] “Jaan Tallinn’s 2024 Philanthropy...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/23

This is a link post. to follow up my philantropic pledge from 2020, i've updated my philanthropy page with the 2024 results. in 2024 my donations funded $51M worth of endpoint grants (plus $2.0M in admin overhead and philanthropic software development). this comfortably exceeded my 2024 commitment of $42M (20k times $2100.00 — the minimum price of ETH in 2024). this also concludes my 5-year donation pledge, but of course my philanthropy continues: eg, i’ve already made over $4M in endpoint grants in

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5:43

[Linkpost] “To Understand History, Keep Former...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/23

This is a link post. Guillaume Blanc has a piece in Works in Progress (I assume based on his paper) about how France's fertility declined earlier than in other European countries, and how its power waned as its relative population declined starting in the 18th century. In 1700, France had 20% of Europe's population (4% of the whole world population). Kissinger writes in Diplomacy with respect to the Versailles Peace Conference: Victory brought home to France the stark realization that revanche had

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20:21

“The EU Is Asking for Feedback on Frontier AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/23

The European AI Office is currently writing the rules for how general-purpose AI (GPAI) models will be governed under the EU AI Act. The are explicitly asking for feedback on how to interpret and operationalize key obligations under the AI Act. This includes the thresholds for systemic risk, the definition of GPAI, how to estimate training compute, and when downstream fine-tuners become legally responsible. Why this matters for AI Safety: The largest labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind)

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48:52

“Societal and technological progress as sewing an...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/22

Joel Z. Leibo [1], Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets [1], William A. Cunningham [1, 2], Sébastien Krier [1], Manfred Diaz [3], Simon Osindero [1] [1] Google DeepMind, [2] University of Toronto, [3] Mila Québec AI Institute Disclaimer: These are our own opinions; they do not represent the views of Google DeepMind as a whole or its broader community of safety researchers. Beyond Alignment: The Patchwork Quilt of Human Coexistence "We pragmatists think of moral progress as more like sewing together a very

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35:44

“You Better Mechanize” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/22

Or you had better not. The question is which one.This post covers the announcement of Mechanize, the skeptical response from those worried AI might kill everyone, and the associated (to me highly frustrating at times) Dwarkesh Patel podcast with founders Tamay Besiroglu and Ege Erdil. Mechanize plans to help advance the automation of AI labor, which is a pivot from their previous work at AI Safety organization Epoch AI. Many were not thrilled by this change of plans. This post doesn’t cover

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15:02

“The US Executive vs Supreme Court Deportations...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/22

Forecaster perspectives Sentinel forecasters in aggregate assess as “83% true” (65% to 100%) the statement that the Trump administration has disobeyed the Supreme Court so far. On the one hand, the Trump administration has done nothing to “facilitate” bringing Abrego García back to the US, and this White House's tweet shown below clearly indicates that it won’t try to; on the other hand, it could yet still do so when the current news cycle subsides. On April 17th, forecasters estimated a 66% chance

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28:51

“Accountability Sinks” by Martin Sustrik

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/22

Back in the 1990s, ground squirrels were briefly fashionable pets, but their popularity came to an abrupt end after an incident at Schiphol Airport on the outskirts of Amsterdam. In April 1999, a cargo of 440 of the rodents arrived on a KLM flight from Beijing, without the necessary import papers. Because of this, they could not be forwarded on to the customer in Athens. But nobody was able to correct the error and send them back either. What could be done with them? It's hard to think there wasn’t

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14:43

“The Uses of Complacency” by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/22

Midjourney Our Culture Expects Self-Justification I really like David Chapman's explication of what he calls “reasonableness” and “accountability.” At least in the culture he and I live in, one is constantly called to account for one's behavior. At any moment, one may be asked “what are you doing?” or “why did you do that?” And one is expected to provide a reasonable answer. What's a reasonable answer? It's not a rigorous, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt proof that at this very moment one is engaging in

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7:23

“$500 Bounty Problem: Are (Approximately)...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/21

Audio note: this article contains 36 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Our posts on natural latents have involved two distinct definitions, which we call "stochastic" and "deterministic" natural latents. We conjecture that, whenever there exists a stochastic natural latent (to within some approximation), there also exists a deterministic natural latent (to within a comparable approximation). We are

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74:09

“Crime and Punishment #1” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/21

This seemed like a good next topic to spin off from monthlies and make into its own occasional series. There's certainly a lot to discuss regarding crime. What I don’t include here, the same way I excluded it from the monthly, are the various crimes and other related activities that may or may not be taking place by the Trump administration or its allies. As I’ve said elsewhere, all of that is important, but I’ve made a decision not to cover it. This is about Ordinary Decent Crime. Table of

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19:38

“AI 2027 is a Bet Against Amdahl’s Law” by snewman

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/21

AI 2027 lies at a Pareto frontier – it contains the best researched argument for short timelines, or the shortest timeline backed by thorough research[1]. My own timelines are substantially longer, and there are credible researchers whose timelines are longer still. For this reason, I thought it would be interesting to explore the key load-bearing arguments AI 2027 presents for short timelines. This, in turn, allows for some discussion of signs we can watch for to see whether those load-bearing

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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