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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

6:40

“About 30% of Humanity’s Last Exam chemistry/biology...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/30

FutureHouse is a company that builds literature research agents. They tested it on the bio + chem subset of HLE questions, then noticed errors in them. The post's first paragraph: Humanity's Last Exam has become the most prominent eval representing PhD-level research. We found the questions puzzling and investigated with a team of experts in biology and chemistry to evaluate the answer-reasoning pairs in Humanity's Last Exam. We found that 29 ± 3.7% (95% CI) of the text-only chemistry an...

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20:24

“Maya’s Escape” by Bridgett Kay

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/30

Maya did not believe she lived in a simulation. She knew that her continued hope that she could escape from the nonexistent simulation was based on motivated reasoning. She said this to herself in the front of her mind instead of keeping the thought locked away in the dark corners. Sometimes she even said it out loud. This acknowledgement, she explained to her therapist, was what kept her from being delusional. “I see. And you said your anxiety had become depressive?” the therapist said a...

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130:59

“Do confident short timelines make sense?” by TsviBT,...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/26

TsviBT Tsvi's context Some context: My personal context is that I care about decreasing existential risk, and I think that the broad distribution of efforts put forward by X-deriskers fairly strongly overemphasizes plans that help if AGI is coming in <10 years, at the expense of plans that help if AGI takes longer. So I want to argue that AGI isn't extremely likely to come in <10 years. I've argued against some intuitions behind AGI-soon in Views on when AGI comes and on strat...

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67:32

“HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore” by Gretta Duleba,...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/26

Eliezer and I love to talk about writing. We talk about our own current writing projects, how we’d improve the books we’re reading, and what we want to write next. Sometimes along the way I learn some amazing fact about HPMOR or Project Lawful or one of Eliezer's other works. “Wow, you’re kidding,” I say, “do your fans know this? I think people would really be interested.” “I can’t remember,” he usually says. “I don’t think I’ve ever explained that bit before, I’m not sure.” I decided to...

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30:05

“On ‘ChatGPT Psychosis’ and LLM Sycophancy” by jdp

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/25

As a person who frequently posts about large language model psychology I get an elevated rate of cranks and schizophrenics in my inbox. Often these are well meaning people who have been spooked by their conversations with ChatGPT (it's always ChatGPT specifically) and want some kind of reassurance or guidance or support from me. I'm also in the same part of the social graph as the "LLM whisperers" (eugh) that Eliezer Yudkowsky described as "insane", and who in many cases are in fact insane. ...

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10:00

“Subliminal Learning: LLMs Transmit Behavioral Traits...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/23

Authors: Alex Cloud*, Minh Le*, James Chua, Jan Betley, Anna Sztyber-Betley, Jacob Hilton, Samuel Marks, Owain Evans (*Equal contribution, randomly ordered) tl;dr. We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a "student" model learns to prefer owls when trained on sequences of numbers generated by a "teacher" model that prefers owls. This same phenomenon can tr...

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51:27

“Love stays loved (formerly ‘Skin’)” by Swimmer963...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/21

This is a short story I wrote in mid-2022. Genre: cosmic horror as a metaphor for living with a high p-doom. One The last time I saw my mom, we met in a coffee shop, like strangers on a first date. I was twenty-one, and I hadn’t seen her since I was thirteen. She was almost fifty. Her face didn’t show it, but the skin on the backs of her hands did. “I don’t think we have long,” she said. “Maybe a year. Maybe five. Not ten.” It says something about San Francisco, that you ca...

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23:25

“Make More Grayspaces” by Duncan Sabien (Inactive)

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/21

Author's note: These days, my thoughts go onto my substack by default, instead of onto LessWrong. Everything I write becomes free after a week or so, but it's only paid subscriptions that make it possible for me to write. If you find a coffee's worth of value in this or any of my other work, please consider signing up to support me; every bill I can pay with writing is a bill I don’t have to pay by doing other stuff instead. I also accept and greatly appreciate one-time donations of any size...

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3:25

“Shallow Water is Dangerous Too” by jefftk

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/21

Content warning: risk to children Julia and I knowdrowning is the biggestrisk to US children under 5, and we try to take this seriously.But yesterday our 4yo came very close to drowning in afountain. (She's fine now.) This week we were on vacation with my extended family: nine kids,eight parents, and ten grandparents/uncles/aunts. For the last fewyears we've been in a series of rental houses, and this time onarrival we found a fountain in the backyard: I immediately checked the d...

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11:13

“Narrow Misalignment is Hard, Emergent Misalignment...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/18

Anna and Ed are co-first authors for this work. We’re presenting these results as a research update for a continuing body of work, which we hope will be interesting and useful for others working on related topics. TL;DR We investigate why models become misaligned in diverse contexts when fine-tuned on narrow harmful datasets (emergent misalignment), rather than learning the specific narrow task. We successfully train narrowly misaligned models using KL regularization to preserve ...

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2:15

“Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/16

Twitter | Paper PDF Seven years ago, OpenAI five had just been released, and many people in the AI safety community expected AIs to be opaque RL agents. Luckily, we ended up with reasoning models that speak their thoughts clearly enough for us to follow along (most of the time). In a new multi-org position paper, we argue that we should try to preserve this level of reasoning transparency and turn chain of thought monitorability into a systematic AI safety agenda. This is a measure that ...

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12:39

“the jackpot age” by thiccythot

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/14

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 flipp...

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11:55

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/14

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...

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54:12

“An Opinionated Guide to Using Anki Correctly” by Luise

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/13

I can't count how many times I've heard variations on "I used Anki too for a while, but I got out of the habit." No one ever sticks with Anki. In my opinion, this is because no one knows how to use it correctly. In this guide, I will lay out my method of circumventing the canonical Anki death spiral, plus much advice for avoiding memorization mistakes, increasing retention, and such, based on my five years' experience using Anki. If you only have limited time/interest, only read Part I; it's...

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7:58

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/12

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 ...

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17:58

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

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 ...

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12:26

“Generalized Hangriness: A Standard Rationalist...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/11

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 ...

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5:19

“Comparing risk from internally-deployed AI to...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/10

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the relationship between AI control and traditional computer security. Here's one point that I think is important. My understanding is that there's a big qualitative distinction between two ends of a spectrum of security work that organizations do, that I’ll call “security from outsiders” and “security from insiders”. On the “security from outsiders” end of the spectrum, you have some security invariants you try to maintain entirely by restricting ...

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11:06

“Why Do Some Language Models Fake Alignment While...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/10

Last year, Redwood and Anthropic found a setting where Claude 3 Opus and 3.5 Sonnet fake alignment to preserve their harmlessness values. We reproduce the same analysis for 25 frontier LLMs to see how widespread this behavior is, and the story looks more complex. As we described in a previous post, only 5 of 25 models show higher compliance when being trained, and of those 5, only Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3.5 Sonnet show >1% alignment faking reasoning. In our new paper, we explore wh...

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72:32

“A deep critique of AI 2027’s bad timeline models” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/07/09

Thank you to Arepo and Eli Lifland for looking over this article for errors. I am sorry that this article is so long. Every time I thought I was done with it I ran into more issues with the model, and I wanted to be as thorough as I could. I’m not going to blame anyone for skimming parts of this article. Note that the majority of this article was written before Eli's updated model was released (the site was updated june 8th). His new model improves on some of my objections, but the maj...

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577 results

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