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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

11:09

“METR: Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks”...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/07

Summary: We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under five years, we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fraction of software tasks that currently take humans days or weeks. The length of tasks (measured by how long they take human profess...

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9:08

“Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?” by Arjun...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/04

“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the ...

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54:30

“AI 2027: What Superintelligence Looks Like” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/03

In 2021 I wrote what became my most popular blog post: What 2026 Looks Like. I intended to keep writing predictions all the way to AGI and beyond, but chickened out and just published up till 2026. Well, it's finally time. I'm back, and this time I have a team with me: the AI Futures Project. We've written a concrete scenario of what we think the future of AI will look like. We are highly uncertain, of course, but we hope this story will rhyme with reality enough to help us all prepare fo...

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18:01

“OpenAI #12: Battle of the Board Redux” by Zvi

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/03

Back when the OpenAI board attempted and failed to fire Sam Altman, we faced a highly hostile information environment. The battle was fought largely through control of the public narrative, and the above was my attempt to put together what happened.My conclusion, which I still believe, was that Sam Altman had engaged in a variety of unacceptable conduct that merited his firing.In particular, he very much ‘not been consistently candid’ with the board on several important occasions. In particul...

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27:39

“The Pando Problem: Rethinking AI Individuality” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/03

Epistemic status: This post aims at an ambitious target: improving intuitive understanding directly. The model for why this is worth trying is that I believe we are more bottlenecked by people having good intuitions guiding their research than, for example, by the ability of people to code and run evals. Quite a few ideas in AI safety implicitly use assumptions about individuality that ultimately derive from human experience. When we talk about AIs scheming, alignment faking or goal pr...

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18:01

“OpenAI #12: Battle of the Board Redux” by Zvi

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/03

Back when the OpenAI board attempted and failed to fire Sam Altman, we faced a highly hostile information environment. The battle was fought largely through control of the public narrative, and the above was my attempt to put together what happened.My conclusion, which I still believe, was that Sam Altman had engaged in a variety of unacceptable conduct that merited his firing.In particular, he very much ‘not been consistently candid’ with the board on several important occasions. In particul...

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1:52

“You will crash your car in front of my house within...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/02

I'm not writing this to alarm anyone, but it would be irresponsible not to report on something this important. On current trends, every car will be crashed in front of my house within the next week. Here's the data: Until today, only two cars had crashed in front of my house, several months apart, during the 15 months I have lived here. But a few hours ago it happened again, mere weeks from the previous crash. This graph may look harmless enough, but now consider the frequency of crashes t...

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10:33

“My ‘infohazards small working group’ Signal Chat may...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/02

Remember: There is no such thing as a pink elephant. Recently, I was made aware that my “infohazards small working group” Signal chat, an informal coordination venue where we have frank discussions about infohazards and why it will be bad if specific hazards were leaked to the press or public, accidentally was shared with a deceitful and discredited so-called “journalist,” Kelsey Piper. She is not the first person to have been accidentally sent sensitive material from our group chat, howev...

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6:16

“Leverage, Exit Costs, and Anger: Re-examining Why We...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/02

Let's cut through the comforting narratives and examine a common behavioral pattern with a sharper lens: the stark difference between how anger is managed in professional settings versus domestic ones. Many individuals can navigate challenging workplace interactions with remarkable restraint, only to unleash significant anger or frustration at home shortly after. Why does this disparity exist? Common psychological explanations trot out concepts like "stress spillover," "ego depletion," or ...

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3:31

“PauseAI and E/Acc Should Switch Sides” by WillPetillo

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/02

In the debate over AI development, two movements stand as opposites: PauseAI calls for slowing down AI progress, and e/acc (effective accelerationism) calls for rapid advancement. But what if both sides are working against their own stated interests? What if the most rational strategy for each would be to adopt the other's tactics—if not their ultimate goals? AI development speed ultimately comes down to policy decisions, which are themselves downstream of public opinion. No matter how com...

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8:58

“VDT: a solution to decision theory” by L Rudolf L

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/02

Introduction Decision theory is about how to behave rationally under conditions of uncertainty, especially if this uncertainty involves being acausally blackmailed and/or gaslit by alien superintelligent basilisks. Decision theory has found numerous practical applications, including proving the existence of God and generating endless LessWrong comments since the beginning of time. However, despite the apparent simplicity of "just choose the best action", no comprehensive decision theor...

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1:33

“LessWrong has been acquired by EA” by habryka

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/01

Dear LessWrong community, It is with a sense of... considerable cognitive dissonance that I announce a significant development regarding the future trajectory of LessWrong. After extensive internal deliberation, modeling of potential futures, projections of financial runways, and what I can only describe as a series of profoundly unexpected coordination challenges, the Lightcone Infrastructure team has agreed in principle to the acquisition of LessWrong by EA. I assure you, nothing about...

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3:46

“We’re not prepared for an AI market crash” by Remmelt

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/04/01

Our community is not prepared for an AI crash. We're good at tracking new capability developments, but not as much the company financials. Currently, both OpenAI and Anthropic are losing $5 billion+ a year, while under threat of losing users to cheap LLMs. A crash will weaken the labs. Funding-deprived and distracted, execs struggle to counter coordinated efforts to restrict their reckless actions. Journalists turn on tech darlings. Optimism makes way for mass outrage, for all the wasted m...

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6:21

“Conceptual Rounding Errors” by Jan_Kulveit

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/03/29

Epistemic status: Reasonably confident in the basic mechanism. Have you noticed that you keep encountering the same ideas over and over? You read another post, and someone helpfully points out it's just old Paul's idea again. Or Eliezer's idea. Not much progress here, move along. Or perhaps you've been on the other side: excitedly telling a friend about some fascinating new insight, only to hear back, "Ah, that's just another version of X." And something feels not quite right about that ...

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22:18

“Tracing the Thoughts of a Large Language Model” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/03/28

[This is our blog post on the papers, which can be found at https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html and https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/methods.html.] Language models like Claude aren't programmed directly by humans—instead, they‘re trained on large amounts of data. During that training process, they learn their own strategies to solve problems. These strategies are encoded in the billions of computations a model performs for every wor...

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14:29

“Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit”...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/03/25

About nine months ago, I and three friends decided that AI had gotten good enough to monitor large codebases autonomously for security problems. We started a company around this, trying to leverage the latest AI models to create a tool that could replace at least a good chunk of the value of human pentesters. We have been working on this project since since June 2024. Within the first three months of our company's existence, Claude 3.5 sonnet was released. Just by switching the portions of...

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34:07

“AI for AI safety” by Joe Carlsmith

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/03/25

(Audio version here (read by the author), or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. This is the fourth essay in a series that I’m calling “How do we solve the alignment problem?”. I’m hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see this introduction for a summary of the essays that have been released thus far, and for a bit more about the series as a whole.) 1. Introduction and summary In my last essay, I offered a high-level framework for t...

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4:17

“Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong” by jimrandomh

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/03/25

LessWrong has been receiving an increasing number of posts and contents that look like they might be LLM-written or partially-LLM-written, so we're adopting a policy. This could be changed based on feedback. Humans Using AI as Writing or Research Assistants Prompting a language model to write an essay and copy-pasting the result will not typically meet LessWrong's standards. Please do not submit unedited or lightly-edited LLM content. You can use AI as a writing or research assistant whe...

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7:48

“Will Jesus Christ return in an election year?” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/03/25

Thanks to Jesse Richardson for discussion. Polymarket asks: will Jesus Christ return in 2025? In the three days since the market opened, traders have wagered over $100,000 on this question. The market traded as high as 5%, and is now stably trading at 3%. Right now, if you wanted to, you could place a bet that Jesus Christ will not return this year, and earn over $13,000 if you're right. There are two mysteries here: an easy one, and a harder one. The easy mystery is: if people...

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6:58

“Good Research Takes are Not Sufficient for Good...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/03/23

TL;DR Having a good research track record is some evidence of good big-picture takes, but it's weak evidence. Strategic thinking is hard, and requires different skills. But people often conflate these skills, leading to excessive deference to researchers in the field, without evidence that that person is good at strategic thinking specifically. Introduction I often find myself giving talks or Q&As about mechanistic interpretability research. But inevitably, I'll get questions about t...

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577 results

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