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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

8:19

“Too Soon” by Gordon Seidoh Worley

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/05/14

It was a cold and cloudy San Francisco Sunday. My wife and I were having lunch with friends at a Korean cafe. My phone buzzed with a text. It said my mom was in the hospital. I called to find out more. She had a fever, some pain, and had fainted. The situation was serious, but stable. Monday was a normal day. No news was good news, right? Tuesday she had seizures. Wednesday she was in the ICU. I caught the first flight to Tampa. Thursday she rested comfortably. Friday she was d...

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4:34

“PSA: The LessWrong Feedback Service” by JustisMills

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/05/13

At the bottom of the LessWrong post editor, if you have at least 100 global karma, you may have noticed this button. The button Many people click the button, and are jumpscared when it starts an Intercom chat with a professional editor (me), asking what sort of feedback they'd like. So, that's what it does. It's a summon Justis button. Why summon Justis? To get feedback on your post, of just about any sort. Typo fixes, grammar checks, sanity checks, clarity checks, fit for LessWrong, ...

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8:20

“Orienting Toward Wizard Power” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/05/08

For months, I had the feeling: something is wrong. Some core part of myself had gone missing. I had words and ideas cached, which pointed back to the missing part. There was the story of Benjamin Jesty, a dairy farmer who vaccinated his family against smallpox in 1774 - 20 years before the vaccination technique was popularized, and the same year King Louis XV of France died of the disease. There was another old post which declared “I don’t care that much about giant yachts. I want a cu...

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13:15

“Interpretability Will Not Reliably Find Deceptive...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/05/05

(Disclaimer: Post written in a personal capacity. These are personal hot takes and do not in any way represent my employer's views.) TL;DR: I do not think we will produce high reliability methods to evaluate or monitor the safety of superintelligent systems via current research paradigms, with interpretability or otherwise. Interpretability seems a valuable tool here and remains worth investing in, as it will hopefully increase the reliability we can achieve. However, interpretability shou...

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11:33

“Slowdown After 2028: Compute, RLVR Uncertainty, MoE...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/05/03

It'll take until ~2050 to repeat the level of scaling that pretraining compute is experiencing this decade, as increasing funding can't sustain the current pace beyond ~2029 if AI doesn't deliver a transformative commercial success by then. Natural text data will also run out around that time, and there are signs that current methods of reasoning training might be mostly eliciting capabilities from the base model. If scaling of reasoning training doesn't bear out actual creation of new cap...

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27:35

“Early Chinese Language Media Coverage of the AI 2027...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/05/01

In this blog post, we analyse how the recent AI 2027 forecast by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean has been discussed across Chinese language platforms. We present: Our research methodology and synthesis of key findings across media artefacts A proposal for how censorship patterns may provide signal for the Chinese government's thinking about AGI and the race to superintelligence A more detailed analysis of each of the nine artefacts, organised ...

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1:17

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/25

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 endpoin...

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15:17

“Impact, agency, and taste” by benkuhn

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/24

I’ve been thinking recently about what sets apart the people who’ve done the best work at Anthropic. You might think that the main thing that makes people really effective at research or engineering is technical ability, and among the general population that's true. Among people hired at Anthropic, though, we’ve restricted the range by screening for extremely high-percentile technical ability, so the remaining differences, while they still matter, aren’t quite as critical. Instead, people'...

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5:42

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/24

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 revan...

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15:22

“AI-enabled coups: a small group could use AI to...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/23

We’ve written a new report on the threat of AI-enabled coups. I think this is a very serious risk – comparable in importance to AI takeover but much more neglected. In fact, AI-enabled coups and AI takeover have pretty similar threat models. To see this, here's a very basic threat model for AI takeover: Humanity develops superhuman AI Superhuman AI is misaligned and power-seeking Superhuman AI seizes power for itself And now here's a closely analogous threat model for AI-e...

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28:50

“Accountability Sinks” by Martin Sustrik

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/23

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...

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10:46

“Training AGI in Secret would be Unsafe and...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/21

Subtitle: Bad for loss of control risks, bad for concentration of power risks I’ve had this sitting in my drafts for the last year. I wish I’d been able to release it sooner, but on the bright side, it’ll make a lot more sense to people who have already read AI 2027. There's a good chance that AGI will be trained before this decade is out. By AGI I mean “An AI system at least as good as the best human X’ers, for all cognitive tasks/skills/jobs X.” Many people seem to be dismissing this...

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1:15

“Why Should I Assume CCP AGI is Worse Than USG AGI?”...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/20

Though, given my doomerism, I think the natsec framing of the AGI race is likely wrongheaded, let me accept the Dario/Leopold/Altman frame that AGI will be aligned to the national interest of a great power. These people seem to take as an axiom that a USG AGI will be better in some way than CCP AGI. Has anyone written justification for this assumption? I am neither an American citizen nor a Chinese citizen. What would it mean for an AGI to be aligned with "Democracy" or "Confucianism" o...

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35:51

“Surprising LLM reasoning failures make me think we...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/17

Introduction Writing this post puts me in a weird epistemic position. I simultaneously believe that: The reasoning failures that I'll discuss are strong evidence that current LLM- or, more generally, transformer-based approaches won't get us AGI As soon as major AI labs read about the specific reasoning failures described here, they might fix them But future versions of GPT, Claude etc. succeeding at the tasks I've described here will provide zero evidence of their ability to reach AG...

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21:00

“Frontier AI Models Still Fail at Basic Physical...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/16

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently worried about a world where only 30% of jobs become automated, leading to class tensions between the automated and non-automated. Instead, he predicts that nearly all jobs will be automated simultaneously, putting everyone "in the same boat." However, based on my experience spanning AI research (including first author papers at COLM / NeurIPS and attending MATS under Neel Nanda), robotics, and hands-on manufacturing (including machining prototype rock...

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57:32

“Negative Results for SAEs On Downstream Tasks and...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/12

Audio note: this article contains 31 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Lewis Smith*, Sen Rajamanoharan*, Arthur Conmy, Callum McDougall, Janos Kramar, Tom Lieberum, Rohin Shah, Neel Nanda * = equal contribution The following piece is a list of snippets about research from the GDM mechanistic interpretability team, which we didn’t consider a good fit for turning into a paper, but which w...

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4:12

[Linkpost] “Playing in the Creek” by Hastings

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/11

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 ...

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40:27

“Thoughts on AI 2027” by Max Harms

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/10

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...

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2:10

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

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 A...

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41:04

“Alignment Faking Revisited: Improved Classifiers and...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/09

In this post, we present a replication and extension of an alignment faking model organism: Replication: We replicate the alignment faking (AF) paper and release our code. 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, o...

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