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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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16:21

“Beren’s Essay on Obedience and Alignment” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/20

Like Daniel Kokotajlo's coverage of Vitalik's response to AI-2027, I've copied the author's text. This time the essay is actually good, but has little flaws. I also expressed some disagreements with SOTA discourse around the post-AGI utopia. One question which I have occasionally pondered is: assuming that we actually succeed at some kind of robust alignment of AGI, what is the alignment target we should focus on? In general, this question splits into two basic camps. The first is obedience and

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22:47

“Preventing covert ASI development in countries...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/20

We at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute's Technical Governance Team have proposed an illustrative international agreement (blog post) to halt the development of superintelligence until it can be done safely. For those who haven’t read it already, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the agreement before reading this post. Summary This post addresses a common objection to our proposed international agreement to halt ASI development: that countries would simply cheat by pursuing covert

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27:18

“The Bughouse Effect” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/19

Crosspost from my blog.What happens when you work closely with someone on a really difficult project—and then they seem to just fuck it up? This is a post about two Chess variants; one very special emotion; and how life is kinda like Chess Bughouse. Let's goooooo! Crazyhouse My favorite time-waster is Crazyhouse Chess. Crazyhouse Chess is mostly like regular Chess. In regular Chess, players take turns making a move, Bishops go diagonally and Rooks go straight, and you try to trap your

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14:41

“Serious Flaws in CAST” by Max Harms

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/19

Last year I wrote the CAST agenda, arguing that aiming for Corrigibility As Singular Target was the least-doomed way to make an AGI. (Though it is almost certainly wiser to hold off on building it until we have more skill at alignment, as a species.) I still basically believe that CAST is right. Corrigibility still seems like a promising target compared to full alignment with human values, since there's a better story for how a near-miss when aiming towards corrigibility might be recoverable, but a

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12:41

“Memories of a British Boarding School #2” by Ben Pace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/19

I have been reliably informed that, while my last series of memories about boarding school were interesting to read, they were lacking in a key element: stories about the 'boarding' part of boarding school. Music is interesting but not even in the title. I will here endeavor to amend this error. It is quite satisfying to share a room with someone you like. It is a pain to share with someone you don't. But what I learned at boarding school is that, to share a room with someone who is merely neutral,

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9:25

“Automate, automate it all” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/19

Context: Post #9 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. First, a disclaimer. Before you automate something, first see whether you can just not do the thing at all. Questioning the Requirements is a step that should always happen before you gleefully systematize a task. One reason for focusing on automation that bites harder at Lightcone than other places is that we are an organization that is trying very hard to stay small and in-sync with each

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6:02

“How the aliens next door shower” by Ruby

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/19

Episode Recap In this series, I have been building up the argument that other people's internal psychology is much weirder and a lot more alien than it seems on the surface, and that this explains why most humans on this planet fail to make obvious and important inferences. They just don't think right. Supporting arguments so far: Human thought has a lot more degrees of freedom than we manage to remember because surface-level conscious thoughts are made up of many little micro-acts of cognition

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6:45

“Victor Taelin’s notes on Gemini 3” by Gunnar_Zarncke

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/19

Victor Taelin of Higher Order Company has some of the hardest computer science problems the LLMs most likely have never seen before and evaluated Gemini 3 on them. Here is his tweet reproduced almost in full. Short Version First of all: you've all seen the benchmarks, so I don't think you need me to judge this one. Still, based on my tests, this is as real as it gets, and I want to talk about it. This model outperforms GPT-5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Deep Think, and everything else, on my hardest problems,

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8:58

“Anthropic is (probably) not meeting its RSP security...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/19

TLDR: An AI company's model weight security is at most as good as its compute providers' security. Anthropic has committed (with a bit of ambiguity, but IMO not that much ambiguity) to be robust to attacks from corporate espionage teams at companies where it hosts its weights. Anthropic seems unlikely to be robust to those attacks. Hence they are in violation of their RSP. Anthropic is committed to being robust to attacks from corporate espionage teams (which includes corporate espionage teams at

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14:28

“Considerations for setting the FLOP thresholds in...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/19

We at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute's Technical Governance Team have proposed an illustrative international agreement (blog post) to halt the development of superintelligence until it can be done safely. For those who haven’t read it already, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the agreement before reading this post. TLDR: This post explains our reasoning for the FLOP thresholds in our proposed international AI agreement: we prohibit training runs above 10 to the 24 FLOP and

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6:53

“New Report: An International Agreement to Prevent...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

TLDR: We at the MIRI Technical Governance Team have released a report describing an example international agreement to halt the advancement towards artificial superintelligence. The agreement is centered around limiting the scale of AI training, and restricting certain AI research. Experts argue that the premature development of artificial superintelligence (ASI) poses catastrophic risks, from misuse by malicious actors, to geopolitical instability and war, to human extinction due to misaligned

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8:01

“Status Is The Game Of The Losers’ Bracket” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

This post is written as a series of little thoughts and vignettes, all trying to gesture at the same idea. The hope is to convey the gestalt. Consider the game of middle management, of climbing the hierarchy at a big company. The status games, the simulacrum 3/4 games, the politics, the moral mazes, all that jazz. Then, open up Forbes’ list of N richest people, and count how many of them got on that list by climbing the management hierarchy at a big company. I predict that, to within reasonable

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4:51

“Eat The Richtext” by dreeves

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

A year and a half ago I vibe-coded a tool, Eat The Richtext, that I've been using practically every day (every week in any case) ever since. Friends tell me they continue to use it as well. I think that means it's time for it to graduate from the blurb I put on LessWrong to a proper LessWrong post. Ok, you know how sometimes you copy/paste a chunk of text into Discord or GitHub Issues or a text message or anywhere else that doesn't support rich text (aka RTF)? And then alllll of the following

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9:47

“Small batches and the mythical single piece flow” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

Context: Post #8 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. When you finish something, you learn something about how you did that thing. When you finish many things at the same time, you do not get to apply the lessons you learned from each of those things to the others. This insight, turns out, was non-trivially a core cause of the industrial revolution. The assembly line is one of the foundational technologies of modern manufacturing. In the

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20:32

“How Colds Spread” by RobertM

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

It seems like a catastrophic civilizational failure that we don't have confident common knowledge of how colds spread. There have been a number of studies conducted over the years, but most of those were testing secondary endpoints, like how long viruses would survive on surfaces, or how likely they were to be transmitted to people's fingers after touching contaminated surfaces, etc. However, a few of them involved rounding up some brave volunteers, deliberately infecting some of them, and then

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8:52

“Middlemen Are Eating the World (And That’s Good,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

I think many people have some intuition that work can be separated between “real work“ (farming, say, or building trains) and “middlemen” (e.g. accounting, salespeople, lawyers, bureaucrats, DEI strategists). “Bullshit jobs” by David Graeber is a more intellectualized framing of the same intuition. Many people believe that middlemen are entirely useless, and we can get rid of (almost) all middleman jobs, RETVRN to people doing real work, and society would be much better off. Source:

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5:05

“Why is American mass-market tea so terrible?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

Note: definitely true, especially my aesthetic preferences, and the speculative historical synthesis. There are some hedonic treadmills which, even after I've climbed them, let me enjoy the entry-level experience. In the case of tea, the entry-level experience[1] is a cheap tea bag of black tea. Sadly, tea does not have one of the nicer treadmills. Having spent the last few years exploring high-quality Chinese tea of various stripes, a cup of tea brewed from a mass-market tea bag is relegated to

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8:37

“An Analogue Of Set Relationships For Distribution”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

Audio note: this article contains 86 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Here's a conceptual problem David and I have been lightly tossing around the past couple days. “A is a subset of B” we might visualize like this: If we want a fuzzy/probabilistic version of the same diagram, we might draw something like this: And we can easily come up with some ad-hoc operationalization of that “fuzzy subset”

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19:07

“AI 2025 - Last Shipmas” by Simon Lermen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

ACT I: CHRISTMAS EVE It all starts with a cryptic tweet from Jimmy Apples on X. The tweet by Jimmy Apples makes people at other AI labs quite nervous. It spurs a rush in the other AI labs to get their own automated R&D going. They announce fully automated AI R&D on Christmas Eve during the annual “12 days of Shipmas”. Initially, AI agents work on curating data, tuning parameters, and improving RL-environments to try to hill-climb evaluations much like human researchers do. The main alignment

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98:49

“Varieties Of Doom” by jdp

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/18

There has been a lot of talk about "p(doom)" over the last few years. This has always rubbed me the wrong way because "p(doom)" didn't feel like it mapped to any specific belief in my head. In private conversations I'd sometimes give my p(doom) as 12%, with the caveat that "doom" seemed nebulous and conflated between several different concepts. At some point it was decided a p(doom) over 10% makes you a "doomer" because it means what actions you should take with respect to AI are overdetermined. I

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