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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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3:50

“Mass Surveillance w/ LLMs is the Default Outcome....

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/04

What's the best case scenario regarding OpenAI's contract w/ the Department of War (DoW)? We have access to the full contract It's airtight OAI's engineers are on top of things in case the DoW breaks the contract There's actual teeth for violations But even then, the DoW can simply switch vendors. Use Gemini. Use Grok. If these models aren't capable enough, then just wait a year. In the past[1], the DoW has purchased commercial location data, on Americans, w/o warrants. In recent negotiations,[2]

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32:28

“A Tale of Three Contracts” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/04

The attempt on Friday by Secretary of War Pete Hegsted to label Anthropic as a supply chain risk and commit corporate murder had a variety of motivations.On its face, the conflict is a tale of three contracts and the associated working relationships. The contract Anthropic signed with the Department of War (DoW) in 2025. The new contract Anthropic was negotiating with DoW, that would have been modified to favor DoW, but where the parties could not reach agreement. The contract OpenAI was

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4:38

“I’m confused by the change in the METR trend” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/04

Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks - METR In their original 2025 paper, METR noticed that the slope (aka task horizon doubling time) of the trendline for models released in 2024 and later is different from the slope for <2024 models. First, I decided to check whether a piecewise linear function fits the data better than a simple linear function. If it doesn't, then this change in trend is a random fluke and there is nothing worth talking about. Here is the data so far (SOTA models

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4:23

“I Had Claude Read Every AI Safety Paper Since 2020”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/04

Click here if you just want to see the Database I made of all[1] AI safety papers written since 2020 and not read the methodology. Over the last month I have been trying to see just how much I can learn and do from a cold start[2] in the world of AI safety. A large part of this has been frantically learning mech interp, but I've picked up two projects that I think are worth sharing! There are a lot of AI Safety papers. When I started working on more hands on projects there wasn't a clear way to

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19:37

“Game Recognizes Game” by eva_

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/03

Epistemic Status: Further Research Needed, would be a shorter essay if I thought about it for longer. Conspiracies exist. Some of them are quite large, involve people who met as adults and agreed to do crimes together, and do many heinous things that multiple co-conspirators know about for years without the police noticing. Some organised crime groups start within families. If you were all raised in the same family-first culture and they're your cousin, you can be pretty sure they're not a cop

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13:01

“An Alignment Journal: Coming Soon” by Dan MacKinlay,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/03

tl;dr We’re incubating an academic journal for AI alignment: rapid peer-review of foundational Alignment research that the current publication ecosystem underserves. Key bets: paid attributed review, reviewer-written synthesis abstracts, and targeted automation. Contact us if you’re interested in participating as an author, reviewer, or editor, or if you know someone who might be. Experimental Infrastructure for Foundational Alignment Research This is the first in a series of “build-in-the-open”

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34:30

“Current activation oracles are hard to use” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/03

This work was conducted during the MATS 9.0 program under Neel Nanda and Senthooran Rajamanoharan. tldr; Activation oracles (Karvonen et al.) are a recent technique where a model is finetuned to answer natural language questions about another model's activations. They showed some promising signs of generalising to tasks fairly different to what they were trained for so we decided to try them on a bunch of safety relevant tasks. Overall, activation oracles showed some signal on tasks close to

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19:05

“In-context learning of representations can be...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/03

This is a crosspost of my ICLR 2026 blogpost track post. All code and experiments are available at github.com/andyrdt/iclr_induction. Summary Park et al., 2025 show that when large language models (LLMs) process random walks on a graph, their internal representations come to mirror the underlying graph's structure. The authors interpret this broadly, suggesting that LLMs can "manipulate their representations in order to reflect concept semantics specified entirely in-context". In this post, we take

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3:30

“Epstein and my world model” by Eye You

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/02

Have you guys heard about this Epstein stuff? Shit's pretty crazy. Note: I'm not going to provide a summary of the situation or talk about evidence; this piece is for people that already know these things. I'm going to avoid specifics about what Epstein and co did, and instead will use vague terms like "Epstein stuff". This is a short post about how I've updated my world model. Particular things that I find very surprising: that so many people basically knew what was going on and didn't say

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172:45

“Secretary of War Tweets That Anthropic is Now a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/02

This is the long version of what happened so far. I will strive for shorter ones later, when I have the time to write them. Most of you should read the first two sections, then choose the remaining sections that are relevant to your interests. But first, seriously, read Dean Ball's post Clawed. Do that first. I will not quote too extensively from it, because I am telling all of you to read it. Now. You’re not allowed to keep reading this or anything else until after you do. I’m not kidding.

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5:29

“War Claude” by PeterMcCluskey

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/02

What a weekend. Two new wars in Asia don't qualify as top news. My first reaction to Hegseth's conflict with Anthropic was along the lines of: I expected an attempt at quasi-nationalization of AI, but not this soon. And I expected it to look like it was managed by national security professionals. Hegseth doesn't look like he's trying to avoid the role of cartoon villain. On closer inspection, it doesn't look very much like nationalization. A significant part of what's going on is bribery

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25:04

“How to Design Environments for Understanding Model...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/02

Authors: Gerson Kroiz*, Aditya Singh*, Senthooran Rajamanoharan, Neel Nanda Gerson and Aditya are co-first authors. This work was conducted during MATS 9.0 and was advised by Senthooran Rajamanoharan and Neel Nanda. TL;DR Understanding why a model took an action is a key question in AI Safety. It is a difficult question, as often many motivations could plausibly lead to the same action. We are particularly concerned about the case of model incrimination, i.e. observing a model taking a bad action

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16:48

“Tools to generate realistic prompts help...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/02

TLDR We train and many-shot prompt base models to generate user prompts that are harder to distinguish from deployment (WildChat) prompts. Then we give Petri, an automated auditing agent, a tool to use a prompt generator model for sycophancy audits. It doesn’t help with making the full audit transcripts harder to distinguish from deployment transcripts, despite more realistic single-turn prompts. We find evidence that full audit realism is bottlenecked not by prompt quality, but by higher-level

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8:07

“OpenAI employees: Now is the time to stop doing good...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/02

Americans don't like OpenAI very much anymore, and you know why. Of course, AI systems it helped make have caused various problems already, like: bots pushing politics on social media maintainers of open source projects having their time wasted, and sometimes quitting AI-generated scientific papers crowding out good research scammers who clone the voice of a family member AI-generated fake pictures fooling people on Facebook And gamers haven't been huge fans of OpenAI since it bought up half the

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2:19

“An Open Letter to the Department of War and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/01

There's an open letter opposing the DoW's assignment of Anthropic as a supply chain risk. It needs more signatures before it gets sent. If you're a tech founder, engineer, or investor and you agree with the letter, then your signature would help bolster its message. Your signature would be especially impactful if you work at a non-Anthropic SOTA AI lab. You can sign the letter here: https://app.dowletter.org/ Full text follows: We write as founders, engineers, investors, and executives in the

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5:46

“Introducing and Deprecating WoFBench” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/01

We present and formally deprecate WoFBench, a novel test that compares the knowledge of Wings of Fire superfans to frontier AI models. The benchmark showed initial promise as a challenging evaluation, but unfortunately proved to be saturated on creation as AI models and superfans produced output that was, to the extent of our ability to score responses, statistically indistinguishable from entirely correct. Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in model

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17:39

“I’m Bearish On Personas For ASI Safety” by J Bostock

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/01

TL;DR Your base LLM has no examples of superintelligent AI in its training data. When you RL it into superintelligence, it will have to extrapolate to how a superintelligent Claude would behave. The LLM's extrapolation may not converge optimizing for what humanity would, on reflection, like to optimize, because these are different processes with different inductive biases. Intro I'm going to take the Persona Selection Model as being roughly true, for now. Even on its own terms, it will fail. If the

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30:45

“Coherent Care” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/01

I've been trying to gather my thoughts for my next tiling theorem (agenda write-up here; first paper; second paper; recent project update). I have a lot of ideas for how to improve upon my work so far, and trying to narrow them down to an achievable next step has been difficult. However, my mind keeps returning to specific friends who are not yet convinced of Updateless Decision Theory (UDT). I am not out to argue that UDT is the perfect decision theory; see eg here and here. However, I strongly

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5:04

[Linkpost] ”“Fibbers’ forecasts are worthless” (The...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/01

This is a link post. One of the very admirable things about the LessWrong community is their willingness to take arguments very seriously, regardless of who put that argument forward. In many circumstances, this is an excellent discipline! But if you're acting as a manager (or a voter), you often need to consider not just arguments, but also practical proposals made by specific agents: Should X be allowed to pursue project Y? Should I make decisions based on X claiming Z, when I cannot verify Z

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74:51

“Schelling Goodness, and Shared Morality as a Goal”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/28

Also available in markdown at theMultiplicity.ai/blog/schelling-goodness.This post explores a notion I'll call Schelling goodness. Claims of Schelling goodness are not first-order moral verdicts like "X is good" or "X is bad." They are claims about a class of hypothetical coordination games in the sense of Thomas Schelling, where the task being coordinated on is a moral verdict. In each such game, participants aim to give the same response regarding a moral question, by reasoning about what a

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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