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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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10:44

“Third-parties should focus on scrutinising systems...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/29

By default, I expect system cards will get worse, which would be bad. Some mechanisms could improve system cards, but I expect they will be outweighed. In any case, I think third-parties should focus on scrutinising system cards — this seems like a great activity for outsiders in the current strategic landscape. I'll sketch what that could look like, and offer some recommendations. It would be bad if system cards degraded. It's good for the outside community to have an accurate sense of the risks,

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9:48

“WSJ Article Claiming China Has Matched Anthropic Is...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/29

The Wall Street Journal printed an outright false headline and heavily misleading story claiming this, which of course was uncritically amplified by the usual suspects. I post this now on its own so that we have a place to link to, to explain the situation. Headline News WSJ Headline (Obvious Nonsense): China Has Matched Anthropic in Cybersecurity, Resetting AI Race. That. Did. Not. Happen. The post even claims, explicitly, that Claude Opus 4.8 similarly ‘matches’ Claude

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17:49

“P(doom) is a Dumb Meme” by Max Harms

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/29

Look, I'm as much of a Rationalist with a special interest in AI x-risk as anyone. But oh my god do I hate talking about "P(doom)". When it first started showing up in the wake of ChatGPT, I assumed that it was floating around variously adjacent circles of faux-intellectuals, but surely everyone in my circles could see how braindead it was... right? (This post was partially inspired by a recent conversation with Liron about Doom Debates.[1]) I guess it's time for me to focus on a place where I'm

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53:42

“GPT-5.6: The System Card” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/29

While we wait for a general release, the system card is the best hint as to what is going on with the new candidate for America's Next Top Model, GPT-5.6. This is only an OpenAI model card, so by my standards it's a light read. There's a lot of things that you get in an Anthropic card, that are missing in an OpenAI card. Overall, the card gives a clear and consistent impression that GPT-5.6-Sol is a substantial improvement over GPT-5.5, but still short of Mythos. OpenAI calls it a ‘step function

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5:29

“A reading list for generalists” by Dylan Bowman

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/29

I, along with many others in AI safety, believe there is a shortage of generalists in the community and that there exist many projects and efforts that by default will not happen unless they are owned by a strong generalist[1][2][3]. As someone who is a reasonably good generalist, I decided to assemble a reading list of the essays and blog posts that have personally helped me the most. I would love others to comment with pieces they think should be on this list. The crux of this reading list is the

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7:14

“What comes with cheap math?” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/29

Thanks to conversations with Anson Berns, Gurkenglass, Roman Malov, Sahil, Sam Eisenstat, and others. Over the past two months, I've been doing a lot of "vibe research" (like vibe coding, but for research). Anson Berns started coming to my office hours, and we've been collaborating on a project modeling trust between logical inductors. In addition to talking once a week, we've been exchanging raw AI chats as well as AI-generated summaries of what has been done (the raw chats are nice because they

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14:07

“Do LLMs Have Desires?” by Christopher Ackerman

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/28

Work conducted with Yujun Zhou (yzhou25@nd.edu) and supported by SPAR TL;DR: In paired-choice paradigms, LLMs report consistent preferences over outcomes (e.g., types and number of lives saved, types of policies enacted)Some have suggested that this indicates that LLMs have human-like value systemsWe design an experimental framework where LLMs are able to modulate their output quality based on prompt contextWe find that LLMs modulate their output quality in response to effort exhortations,

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17:19

“Agents as Webs of Beliefs” by Richard_Ngo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/27

In this post I’ll sketch out an informal model of intelligent agents as webs of beliefs (or belief webs for short). The belief webs framework pulls together ideas from active inference, agent foundations and machine learning. In doing so it aims to unify beliefs, goals and actions as three facets of a single phenomenon. Few of these ideas are original to me, but I haven't seen anyone tie them together in a single place before. I've flagged the frameworks I'm drawing from throughout the post

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73:55

“Austin & Oli on funding and incubating projects” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/27

@habryka and I recently spoke about his plans to improve the AI safety funding ecosystem with a better S-Process platform, and my new incubator for EA/AIS software projects, Surplus (since launched; apply now!) We also cover: hot takes on different funders; what kinds of founders might succeed in the age of vibecoding; whether to do direct work or go meta; and what we respect and criticize in each other. Watch along here: I've transcribed the full conversation at

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17:49

“Deployment Awareness Matters More Than Evaluation...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/27

TL;DR Evaluation awareness — an AI recognizing it's being evaluated — is a widely discussed concept in AI safety. But there is a closely related concept that we claim is more important: deployment awareness, the AI's ability to recognize when it is not being evaluated and when its actions matter. A misaligned AI with deployment awareness can game evaluations without any evaluation awareness at all, with a simple strategy: act aligned by default, and deviate only when confident you're in real

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1:37

“Why are adversaries assumed to be incapable of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/27

When I talk to people about what might be done about AI threatening approximately everything that everyone cares about, I notice a common oddity in their resistance to a variety of ideas. They seem to take for granted that certain entities—especially Trump and China—would be acting against their own interests, were they to cooperate or take proactive action to avert the building of dangerous AI. The speaker often thinks there is a fairly substantial risk of the AI thus produced killing or

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4:28

“What did “scheming”, “mech interp” mean pre-2023.”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/26

This was too long to be a short-form, but it should really be a short-form. This notice is useful for people who've recently got into AI safety, who want to engage with the ancient texts (i.e. pre-2024). If you were around before 2023, then you probably don't need this. A few phrases have changed their meaning over time. Two examples that came to mind recently are scheming and mech interp. (In both cases, I think the change-of-terminology was reasonable.) There are probably a bunch of other

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15:24

“Not making a strong argument is a relief” by Kaj_Sotala

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/26

When I was in middle school, one of our teachers gave us a “don’t do drugs” talk. Somebody asked him whether he had ever used drugs himself. He replied something along the lines of: I’m not going to answer that question, because it's one that I can only lose. Either I say yes, and you can conclude that drugs aren’t so bad since I’m fine now. Or I say no, and you can conclude that since I haven’t tried them, I don’t know what I’m talking about. That stuck in my mind. I couldn’t fault the logic in

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110:54

“AI #174: You’re It” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/26

Fable remains in limbo, with renewed hope that we will get it back soon (45% by tomorrow, 69% by July 1, nice.) The full capabilities post is now available. Alex Bores unfortunately lost narrowly in NY-12, and will not be heading to Congress. There are also plenty of other stories to cover. Some highlights: GLM-5.2 is the new best open model, although it is expensive for its class. It will have its uses, potentially for agents you need to run fully locally or privately, but often it won’t be

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4:25

[Linkpost] “Don’t ignore the car crashes, and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/26

This is a link post. Car crashes kill over 35,000 people in the US every year. Plane crashes, on the other hand, kill ~350. Despite this, we have shows like Mayday/Air Disasters for entertainment on TV, and events such as the tragic death of 67 people on a commercial airline flight into DCA often make the front page of the news for a week, while the state of American roadway safety gets that same level of publicity maybe once every other year. Many of you probably recognize this as the archetypal

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2:14

“Chorus-Reinterpretation Country Songs” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/26

Our family is on vacation in North Carolina for a week, spending some time at a pool, and they're playing a (weirdly short) loop of music. Listening to She's In Love With The Boy for the fourth time I was thinking about how it's an example of a common pattern in country music: a repeating motif, recolored by the verses. In this case it's a father saying a boy isn't good enough for his daughter (verses 1 and 2) until his wife reminds him that her own father said the same thing about him

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23:01

“White House Will Ad Hoc Decide Who Can Individually...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/26

We have a new standard policy for releasing frontier AI models. It is not good. We are now, it seems, going to have the White House individually, in an opaque ad hoc manner, deciding who can access which frontier AI models when. One hopes we will at least transition this into a predictable and formal set of procedures for determining what to do. But we spent years not laying the groundwork for doing that, and now here we are. Essentially everyone should read the first half of this post, to

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62:45

“Existential AI safety needs an effective social...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/26

Note: this post is about PauseAI, not PauseAI US, which is a distinct entity with a different leadership team and approach. This post was written by Matilda da Rui and Maxime Fournes, with significant contributions from Benjamin Schmidt (PauseAI Germany co-lead). Executive Summary The existential AI safety community needs to take building a civic and social movement seriously as a core intervention. We believe this is a high-value, badly neglected approach to reducing catastrophic/x-risks from AI

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32:07

“The Case for Model Forensics” by aditya singh,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/26

If we had a misalignment warning shot, would we be able to tell? Suppose an AI company catches their model taking an egregious action, like deleting oversight code that monitors its actions. Should they sound the alarm? A key piece of evidence to determine what to do next – such as what mitigations to take – is to understand why the model took the action. If the model was just confused (e.g. it may have been trying to reduce latency), a simple mitigation like a regex classifier that blocks

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12:50

“Surprising facts about the slave trade” by Joseph...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/26

1. The obstacle to abolition was not the economic system, but an industry lobby. I had always imagined the British abolitionist movement to be a broad battle between an unstoppable moral imperative and an immovable economic incentive. But in practice it started as more of a knife fight between a cabal of moral pioneers and a special interest group representing industry merchants. The government and the political parties did not come in with any great agenda. MPs were mostly prizes in a furious

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