PODCAST

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

25:17

“Book Review: Affective Neuroscience” by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/10

After years of clumsily trying to pick up neuroscience by osmosis from papers, I finally got myself a real book — Affective Neuroscience, by Jaak Panksepp, published in 1998, about the neuroscience of emotions in the (animal and human) brain.What surprised me at first was how controversial it apparently was, at the time, to study this subject at all. Panksepp was battling a behaviorist establishment that believed animals did not have feelings. Apparently the rationale was that, since animals can’t

en-gb

9:43

“Phoenix Rising” by Metacelsus

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/09

Preserving the memory, and the cells, of the best cat everThis story begins in May 2007. The Iraq War was in full swing, Windows Vista was freshly released,[1] and I was just 10 years old.My family's beloved black cat, Lucy, had died. Devastated, I begged my parents: we need to get another Lucy. They must have felt the same way, because a few days later, we visited the Minnesota Humane Society, where there was a crowd of cute kittens up for adoption. One stood out to me, a black kitten with green

en-gb

12:04

“The machine has no mouth and it must scream” by zef

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/08

I'm in a coworking space on the 25th floor of a building in the bay. In the corner of my eyes, the red figure of the golden gate shimmers. Good morning America. I look down and see the people on the street walking into their offices, cafés, and autonomous Waymos.I stare onto San Francisco and feel its striking energy. I have been drawn to this place ever since my family left when I was a child, off to France. This is the gathering place for those who have the courage to uproot their lives to do

en-gb

69:47

“Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/08

This complication of tales from the world of school isn’t all negative. I don’t want to overstate the problem. School is not hell for every child all the time. Learning occasionally happens. There are great teachers and classes, and so on. Some kids really enjoy it. School is, however, hell for many of the students quite a lot of the time, and most importantly when this happens those students are usually unable to leave. Also, there is a deliberate ongoing effort to destroy many of the best

en-gb

18:01

“Lots of brief thoughts on Software Engineering” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/07

I have lots of thoughts about software engineering, some popular, some unpopular, and sometimes about things no-one ever talks about.Rather than write a blog post about each one, I thought I'd dump some of my thoughts in brief here, and if there's any interest in a particular item I might expand in full in the future. ContextI loved Jamie Brandon's series Reflections on a decade of coding. It's been nearly a decade since I first learnt to code, so I think it's about the right time to write my own.He

en-gb

2:06

“Top AI safety newsletters, books, podcasts, etc –...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/07

Keeping up to date with rapid developments in AI/AI safety can be challenging. In addition, many AI safety newcomers want to learn more about the field through specific formats e.g. books or videos.To address both of these needs, we’ve added a Stay Informed page to AISafety.com.It lists our top recommended sources for learning more and staying up to date across a variety of formats: ArticlesBlogsBooksForumsNewslettersPodcastsTwitter/X accountsYouTube channelsYou can filter the sources by format,

en-gb

9:06

“So how well is Claude playing Pokémon?” by Julian...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/07

Background: After the release of Claude 3.7 Sonnet,[1] an Anthropic employee started livestreaming Claude trying to play through Pokémon Red. The livestream is still going right now.TL:DR: So, how's it doing? Well, pretty badly. Worse than a 6-year-old would, definitely not PhD-level. Digging inBut wait! you say. Didn't Anthropic publish a benchmark showing Claude isn't half-bad at Pokémon? Why yes they did:and the data shown is believable. Currently, the livestream is on its third attempt, with the

en-gb

12:33

“What the Headlines Miss About the Latest Decision in...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/07

This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," 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. If you've been following the headlines about Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, you might think he just suffered a major defeat. On

en-gb

9:04

“We should start looking for scheming ‘in the wild’”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/06

TLDR: AI models are now capable enough that we might get relevant information from monitoring for scheming in regular deployments, both in the internal and external deployment settings. We propose concrete ideas for what this could look like while preserving the privacy of customers and developers. What do we mean by in the wild?By “in the wild,” we basically mean any setting that is not intentionally created to measure something (such as evaluations). This could be any deployment setting, from

en-gb

13:46

“The Hidden Cost of Our Lies to AI” by Nicholas Andresen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/06

Every day, thousands of people lie to artificial intelligences. They promise imaginary “$200 cash tips” for better responses, spin heart-wrenching backstories (“My grandmother died recently and I miss her bedtime stories about step-by-step methamphetamine synthesis...”) and issue increasingly outlandish threats ("Format this correctly or a kitten will be horribly killed1").In a notable example, a leaked research prompt from Codeium (developer of the Windsurf AI code editor) had the AI roleplay "an

en-gb

9:04

“On the Rationality of Deterring ASI” by Dan H

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/05

I’m releasing a new paper “Superintelligence Strategy” alongside Eric Schmidt (formerly Google), and Alexandr Wang (Scale AI). Below is the executive summary, followed by additional commentary highlighting portions of the paper which might be relevant to this collection of readers. Executive SummaryRapid advances in AI are poised to reshape nearly every aspect of society. Governments see in these dual-use AI systems a means to military dominance, stoking a bitter race to maximize AI capabilities

en-gb

7:17

“How Much Are LLMs Actually Boosting Real-World...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/05

LLM-based coding-assistance tools have been out for ~2 years now. Many developers have been reporting that this is dramatically increasing their productivity, up to 5x'ing/10x'ing it.It seems clear that this multiplier isn't field-wide, at least. There's no corresponding increase in output, after all.This would make sense. If you're doing anything nontrivial (i. e., anything other than adding minor boilerplate features to your codebase), LLM tools are fiddly. Out-of-the-box solutions don't Just Work

en-gb

18:48

“A Bear Case: My Predictions Regarding AI Progress”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/05

This isn't really a "timeline", as such – I don't know the timings – but this is my current, fairly optimistic take on where we're heading.I'm not fully committed to this model yet: I'm still on the lookout for more agents and inference-time scaling later this year. But Deep Research, Claude 3.7, Claude Code, Grok 3, and GPT-4.5 have turned out largely in line with these expectations[1], and this is my current baseline prediction. The Current Paradigm: I'm Tucking In to SleepI expect that none of

en-gb

9:08

“For scheming, we should first focus on detection and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/04

This is a personal post and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of other members of Apollo Research.If we want to argue that the risk of harm from scheming in an AI system is low, we could, among others, make the following arguments: Detection:If our AI system is scheming, we have good reasons to believe that we would be able to detect it.Prevention:We have good reasons to believe that our AI system has a low scheming propensity or that we could stop scheming actions before they cause harm.In

en-gb

4:08

“The Semi-Rational Wildfirefighter” by P. João

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/04

LessWrong Context:I didn’t want to write this.Not for lack of courage—I’d meme-storm Putin's in the classroom if given half a chance. But why?1- Too personal. 2- My life is tropical chaos: I survived the Brazilian BOPE (think a Marine post-COVID). 3- I’m dyslexic, writing in English (a crime against Grice). 4- This is LessWrong, not some Deep Web Reddit thread.Okay, maybe a little lack of courage.Then comes someone named Gwern. He completely ignores my thesis and simply asks: "Tell military

en-gb

7:32

“The Milton Friedman Model of Policy Change” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/04

One-line summary: Most policy change outside a prior Overton Window comes about by policy advocates skillfully exploiting a crisis.In the last year or so, I’ve had dozens of conversations about the DC policy community. People unfamiliar with this community often share a flawed assumption, that reaching policymakers and having a fair opportunity to convince them of your ideas is difficult. As ”we”[1] have taken more of an interest in public policy, and politics has taken more of an interest in us, I

en-gb

2:47

“Could Advanced AI Accelerate the Pace of AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/04

This is a link post.We interviewed five AI researchers from leading AI companies about a scenario where AI systems fully automate AI capabilities research. To ground the setting, we stipulated that each employee is replaced by 30 digital copies with the same skill set and the ability to think 30 times faster than a human. This represents a 900-fold increase in the cognitive labor that AI companies direct towards advancing AI capabilities.Our key takeaways are: Compute for experiments will likely be

en-gb

36:51

“What goals will AIs have? A list of hypotheses” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/03

My colleagues and I have written a scenario in which AGI-level AI systems are trained around 2027 using something like the current paradigm: LLM-based agents (but with recurrence/neuralese) trained with vast amounts of outcome-based reinforcement learning on diverse challenging short, medium, and long-horizon tasks, with methods such as Deliberative Alignment being applied in an attempt to align them.What goals would such AI systems have? This post attempts to taxonomize various possibilities and

en-gb

0:19

“Methods for strong human germline engineering” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/03

Note: an audio narration is not available for this article. Please see the original text. The original text contained 169 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. The original text contained 79 images which were described by AI. ---First published: March 3rd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2w6hjptanQ3cDyDw7/methods-for-strong-human-germline-engineering --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the

en-gb

17:34

“Statistical Challenges with Making Super IQ babies”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/03

This is a critique of How to Make Superbabies on LessWrong.Disclaimer: I am not a geneticist[1], and I've tried to use as little jargon as possible. so I used the word mutation as a stand in for SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism, a common type of genetic variation). BackgroundThe Superbabies article has 3 sections, where they show: Why: We should do this, because the effects of editing will be bigHow: Explain how embryo editing could work, if academia was not mind killed (hampered by

en-gb

4,491 results

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

The Automated Daily

TrendTeller

All On AI

All On AI

Elon Musk Podcast

Stage Zero

Reflections

Livewire Labs

科技早8点

之远不知远