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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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58:18

“Forecasting time to automated superhuman coders [AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/11

Authors: Eli Lifland, Nikola Jurkovic[1], FutureSearch[2]This is supporting research for AI 2027. We'll be cross-posting these over the next week or so. Assumes no large-scale catastrophes happen (e.g., a solar flare, a pandemic, nuclear war), no government or self-imposed slowdown, and no significant supply chain disruptions. All forecasts give a substantial chance of superhuman coding arriving in 2027.Summary We forecast when the leading AGI company will internally develop a superhuman coder

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7:54

“Reactions to METR task length paper are insane” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/11

Epistemic status: Briefer and more to the point than my model of what is going on with LLMs, but also lower effort. Here is the paper. The main reaction I am talking about is AI 2027, but also basically every lesswrong take on AI 2027. A lot of people believe in very short AI timelines, say <2030. They want to justify this with some type of outside view, straight-lines-on-graphs argument, which is pretty much all we've got because nobody has a good inside view on deep learning (change my

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4:13

[Linkpost] “Playing in the Creek” by Hastings

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/10

This is a link post. When I was a really small kid, one of my favorite activities was to try and dam up the creek in my backyard. I would carefully move rocks into high walls, pile up leaves, or try patching the holes with sand. The goal was just to see how high I could get the lake, knowing that if I plugged every hole, eventually the water would always rise and defeat my efforts. Beaver behaviour. One day, I had the realization that there was a simpler approach. I could just go get a big 5 foot

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10:44

“Disempowerment spirals as a likely mechanism for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/10

When complex systems fail, it is often because they have succumbed to what we call "disempowerment spirals" — self-reinforcing feedback loops where an initial threat progressively undermines the system's capacity to respond, leading to accelerating vulnerability and potential collapse. Consider a city gradually falling under the control of organized crime. The criminal organization doesn't simply overpower existing institutions through sheer force. Rather, it systematically weakens the city's

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59:59

“The case for AGI by 2030” by Benjamin_Todd

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/10

I spent a couple of weeks writing this new introduction to AI timelines. Posting here in case useful to share and for feedback. The aim is to be up-to-date, more balanced than Situational Awareness, but still relatively accessible to new people.In recent months, the CEOs of leading AI companies have grown increasingly confident about rapid progress: OpenAI's Sam Altman: Shifted from saying in November “the rate of progress continues” to declaring in January “we are now confident we know how to

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2:45

[Linkpost] “New Paper: Infra-Bayesian...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/10

This is a link post. Diffractor is the first author of this paper. Official title: "Regret Bounds for Robust Online Decision Making" Abstract: We propose a framework which generalizes "decision making with structured observations" by allowing robust (i.e. multivalued) models. In this framework, each model associates each decision with a convex set of probability distributions over outcomes. Nature can choose distributions out of this set in an arbitrary (adversarial) manner, that can be nonoblivious

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40:28

“Thoughts on AI 2027” by Max Harms

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/09

This is part of the MIRI Single Author Series. Pieces in this series represent the beliefs and opinions of their named authors, and do not claim to speak for all of MIRI. Okay, I'm annoyed at people covering AI 2027 burying the lede, so I'm going to try not to do that. The authors predict a strong chance that all humans will be (effectively) dead in 6 years, and this agrees with my best guess about the future. (My modal timeline has loss of control of Earth mostly happening in 2028, rather than

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1:29

“Austin Chen on Winning, Risk-Taking, and FTX” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/09

Timothy and I have recorded a new episode of our podcast with Austin Chen of Manifund (formerly of Manifold, behind the scenes at Manifest).The start of the conversation was contrasting each of our North Stars- Winning (Austin), Truthseeking (me), and Flow (Timothy), but I think the actual theme might be “what is an acceptable amount of risk taking?” We eventually got into a discussion of Sam Bankman-Fried, where Austin very bravely shared his position that SBF has been unwisely demonized and

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2:11

“Short Timelines don’t Devalue Long Horizon Research”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/09

Short AI takeoff timelines seem to leave no time for some lines of alignment research to become impactful. But any research rebalances the mix of currently legible research directions that could be handed off to AI-assisted alignment researchers or early autonomous AI researchers whenever they show up. So even hopelessly incomplete research agendas could still be used to prompt future capable AI to focus on them, while in the absence of such incomplete research agendas we'd need to rely on AI's

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0:51

[Linkpost] “birds and mammals independently evolved...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/09

This is a link post. Researchers used RNA sequencing to observe how cell types change during brain development. Other researchers looked at connection patterns of neurons in brains. Clear distinctions have been found between all mammals and all birds. They've concluded intelligence developed independently in birds and mammals; I agree. This is evidence for convergence of general intelligence. ---First published: April 8th, 2025 Source:

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5:20

“The first AI war will be in your computer” by Viliam

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/09

The first AI war will be in your computer and/or smartphone. Companies want to get customers / users. The ones more willing to take "no" for an answer will lose in the competition. You don't need a salesman when an install script (ideally, run without the user's consent) does a better job; and most users won't care. Sometimes Windows during a system update removes dual boot from my computer and replaces it with Windows-only boot. Sometimes a web browser tells me "I noticed that I am not your

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1:52

“Who wants to bet me $25k at 1:7 odds that there...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/08

If there turns out not to be an AI crash, you get a 1/(1+7) * $25,000 = $3,125 If there is an AI crash, you transfer $25k to me. If you believe that AI is going to keep getting more capable, pushing rapid user growth and work automation across sectors, this is near free money. But to be honest, I think there will likely be an AI crash in the next 5 years, and on average expect to profit well from this one-year bet. If I win though, I want to give the $25k to organisers who can act fast to restrict

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41:05

“Alignment Faking Revisited: Improved Classifiers and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/08

In this post, we present a replication and extension of an alignment faking model organism: Replication: We replicate thealignment faking(AF) paper and release ourcode. Classifier Improvements: We significantly improve the precision and recall of the AF classifier. We release a dataset of ~100 human-labelled examples of AF for which our classifier achieves an AUROC of 0.9 compared to 0.6 from the original classifier. Evaluating More Models: We find Llama family models, other open source models,

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11:14

“American College Admissions Doesn’t Need to Be So...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/08

Spoiler: “So after removing the international students from the calculations, and using the middle-of-the-range estimates, the conclusion: The top-scoring 19,000 American students each year are competing in top-20 admissions for about 12,000 spots out of 44,000 total. Among the Ivy League + MIT + Stanford, they’re competing for about 6,500 out of 15,800 total spots.” It's well known that Admission to top universities is very competitive in America and even top SAT scores (1550+ out of 1600)

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12:55

“Most Questionable Details in ‘AI 2027’” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/07

My thoughts on the recently posted story. Caveats I think it's great that the AI Futures Project wrote up a detailed scenario. I enjoy it. Every part of the story i didn't comment on here is either fine or excellent. This is one of the most realistic scenarios i've read. All detailed predictions contain errors. The authors of this scenario don't claim it's the most likely future. If the speed of 2018-2025 was the typical rate of progress in software, then AI 2027 would be realistic. Core

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14:04

“How Gay is the Vatican?” by rba

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/07

The catholic church has always had a complicated relationship with homosexuality. The central claim of Frederic Martel's 2019 book In the Closet of the Vatican is that the majority of the church's leadership in Rome are semi-closeted homosexuals, or more colorfully, "homophiles". So the omnipresence of homosexuals in the Vatican isn’t just a matter of a few black sheep, or the ‘net that caught the bad fish’, as Josef Ratzinger put it. It isn’t a ‘lobby’ or a dissident movement; neither is it a

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16:46

“The Lizardman and the Black Hat Bobcat” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/06

There's an irritating circumstance I call The Black Hat Bobcat, or Bobcatting for short. The Blackhat Bobcat is when there's a terrible behavior that comes up often enough to matter, but rarely enough that it vanishes in the noise of other generally positive feedback.xkcd, A-Minus-Minus The alt-text for this comic is illuminating. "You can do this one in thirty times and still have 97% positive feedback." I would like you to contemplate this comic and alt-text as though it were deep wisdom handed

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21:12

“A collection of approaches to confronting doom, and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/06

I just published A Slow Guide to Confronting Doom, containing my own approach to living in a world that I think has a high likelihood of ending soon. Fortunately I'm not the only person to have written on topic. Below are my thoughts on what others have written. I have not written these such that they stand independent from the originals, and have attentionally not written summaries that wouldn't do the pieces justice. I suggest you read or at least skim the originals. A defence of slowness at the

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27:08

“A Slow Guide to Confronting Doom, v1” by Ruby

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/06

Following a few events[1] in April 2022 that caused a many people to update sharply and negatively on outcomes for humanity, I wrote A Quick Guide to Confronting Doom. I advised: Think for yourself Be gentle with yourself Don't act rashly Be patient about helping Don't act unilaterally Figure out what works for you This is fine advice and all, I stand by it, but it's also not really a full answer to how to contend with the utterly crushing weight of the expectation that everything and everyone

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0:47

“How much progress actually happens in theoretical...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/06

I frequently hear people make the claim that progress in theoretically physics is stalled, partly because all the focus is on String theory and String theory doesn't seem to pan out into real advances. Believing it fits my existing biases, but I notice that I lack the physics understanding to really know whether or not there's progress. What do you think? ---First published: April 4th, 2025 Source:

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