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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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8:49

“A Town Without Children” by SeñorDingDong

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/03

Castel di Tusa, Sicily. It is October 24th, 2025. I look at an empty school. This is the third town in Italy I have visited this Autumn: the other two, one in the hills of Tuscany, the other near the border with Switzerland, were similarly devoid of children. They were not devoid of childish objects. Rusted swing-sets. Dusty soft play corners in Catholic churches. Faded toys in second-hand markets. Towns like these are not unusual in Italy, a country with the lowest birth-rate in Europe (1.2 per

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67:24

“Claude Opus 4.8: Capabilities and Reactions” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/03

You need a lot of data points to understand a new model, and what you have.Trying to gauge from a few benchmarks is misleading. But if you have dozens of them, from a variety of sources, and you put them together with the model card tests and the model welfare information, you can start to form a consistent pattern. Trying to gauge reactions requires volume and calibration, now more than ever, because people are definitively nuts, or at least draw global conclusions from local data. There will

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57:59

“My favorite depiction of utopia” by Caleb Biddulph

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/03

For those who are trying to bring about a glorious transhuman utopia with the help of hopefully-aligned ASI, I think it's worth thinking explicitly about what utopia might actually look like and where it's likely to fall short. To that end, some have helpfully written depictions of utopian (or utopia-adjacent) worlds: The Adventure, Just another day in utopia, The Culture, The Gentle Seduction, The Gentle Romance, Machines of Loving Grace, Friendship is Optimal, Dath Ilan, The Maker of MIND, Failed

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4:58

“Why Even Experts Don’t Know What to Do About AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/02

AI Safety veteran Holden Karnofsky thinks there's a 49% chance his actions are making things worse.[1] In 2025, Jesse Clifton even stepped down as the executive director of the Center on Long-Term risk because of similar reasons. Even top AI Safety strategists don’t know what will make things better, and what will make things worse. Why is it so hard to improve humanity's odds? And what can you do to choose your actions? 1) Hidden Failure Lets You Fail Without Knowing It In AI Safety, impact is

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11:15

“Agent Foundations Reminds Me of Continental...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/02

Nevertheless, I shall take advantage of your kindness in assuming we agree that a science cannot be conditioned upon empiricism. — Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”[1] Freud developed the first modern theory of the unconscious. His writings on drives, dreams and the id were instrumental in developing modern practices of psychology and neuroscience. Modern researchers are unlikely to leverage concepts like the superego or the

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5:29

“Announcing the ARC White-Box Estimation Challenge”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/02

ARC has teamed up with AIcrowd to launch the ARC White-Box Estimation Challenge, a contest to improve upon our estimation algorithms for random MLPs. The warm-up round begins this week, and later rounds will have a total prize pool of at least $100,000. We are very grateful to Sharada Mohanty, Sneha Nanavati, Dipam Chakraborty and everyone else at AIcrowd for working with us to host this contest, as well as to Paul Rosu for testing the contest and to Harshita Khera for operational support.

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50:46

“Tech I’m skeptical of and why” by harsimony

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/02

I’m a fan of people trying things, even if they seem silly. Dismissing risky ideas misses the point of research. But thoughtful criticism can direct effort to more promising fields. To that end, I’m going to try to make my criticism as constructive as possible, with concrete reasons for my pessimism and closely related research areas which are promising (and stand to benefit even from failures in the field I’m criticizing). Not every section will live up to that standard; some arguments are built

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41:26

“Dissolving the Deep Learning Sample Efficiency Gap”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/02

A common observation about deep learning is that it's wildly sample inefficient compared to humans. Deep learning systems appear to need much more real data or environment interaction to reach a given level of capability. A teenager can learn to drive in a few dozen hours; self-driving systems are trained for years on billions of miles of data. A human can become competitive at StarCraft II in well under a year of play, while AlphaStar required imitation learning from roughly 18 years of human

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4:41

″“Contagious Humming” to Silence a Room” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/01

Often when running meetups you’ll have several lively conversations going at the same time. This is a great problem to have, but it can make it difficult to get everyone's attention for announcements. Try using “Contagious Humming” when you need to silence a crowd: Move to a prominent place in the room and use body language that says you have something to say.Start humming at a low and constant tone.Recruit a few compatriots to join.If the crowd has enough people familiar with the technique,

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2:16

[Linkpost] “NYT: Senator Sanders Proposes Gov’t Take...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/01

This is a link post. Quoting from Senator Bernie Sanders Op-Ed in the New York Times today: (...) I will soon be introducing the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. This legislation would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest A.I. companies in our country. How? It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax — not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock. If passed,

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49:42

“Opus 4.8 Part 2: Model Welfare” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/01

Everything impacts everything. All knobs that you turn generalize. Thus, when you try to solve one problem, you often create another. There were clearly attempts to address, in this short time, some of the problems with Opus 4.7, including on the model welfare related fronts, including on questions of honesty and sycophancy and also worries that Claude was learning to tell Anthropic what it wanted to hear in its model welfare evaluations, with everything that implies. The fundamental goals and

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11:44

[Linkpost] “Some humans are both male and female, and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/01

This is a link post. “Potential autofertility in true hermaphrodites”[1] by Istanbul urologist Zeki Bayraktar is among the most bizarre articles I have encountered in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Though the abstract and first few pages contain a secular discussion of intersex conditions, the paper abruptly pivots to an explanation for the birth of Jesus Christ. This theological tangent concludes, “According to Qur’an, it can be said that Mother Mary was a true hermaphrodite, who did not have

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5:38

“Outrunning your headlights” by mattshu0410

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/01

This is exactly the right place to probe. Gromov-Wasserstein is genuinely dimension free. Partial and semi-relaxed are precisely the mechanisms for the abstention/coverage problem we have. Want me to make a new branch and run run_entropic_gwot and invoke semi-relaxed GWOT between your models’ RDMs? Wtf does that even mean? Eh, could be interesting to see the result. Enter A peculiar side effect of model intelligence in discovery-based research is that it's possible to run every

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42:54

“Lighthaven East - A Feasibility Study” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/01

As a bureaucrat, my role is to annoy my friends. Someone voices an idea, “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” or “I wonder if we could…” I make a note. I do some estimates. If it pencils out, I’ll bring it back up, week after week. The discussions are fun, but also practical. We’ll test the waters, what would be a minimum viable scheme? What's easy, what's hard? Who could do the hard parts? Over time the idea gets more detailed, specific, feasible. I’ll pull out a calendar. Soon our scheme has

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17:45

“Notes on axes of variation in third-party risk...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/31

There are many different activities that could be described as "third-party risk assessment". Here are some distinctions that I’ve found helpful thinking about the space over the last few weeks. (Thanks Ajeya Cotra and Paul Christiano for discussions that inspired most of this.) Throughout this, I refer to the actors as: Developers.Stakeholders. These are the people who want to be informed about risks. Possible stakeholders include: governments, the public, the developer's board, the developer's

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9:35

“Financial Costs of an AI Pause?” by PeterMcCluskey

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/31

I’ve analyzed the near-term economic effects of an AI pause, out of concern for my investments, and a desire to predict how strong political opposition to a pause is likely to be. My median estimates: The S&P 500 will drop 27.8%. AI subsectors will drop 34-69%. Interest rates will rise at a much slower rate than would be the case without a pause. The specific numbers depend on some fairly arbitrary assumptions. So please read this post in order to get a feel for how the results depend on the

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11:07

“When Are Two Networks the Same? Tensor Similarity...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/31

We've found a method that tells you: How functionally similar two neural networks are across ALL inputs,Computed solely from the weights (i.e. no data),Using a principled generalization of cosine similarity. There's only one catch: you have to use a tensor network. We've already shown that tensor-transformer variants are performant (this isn't a novel claim, see these papers for MLPs and Attention), so here we're focusing on the interpretability advances. Linear Algebra Applies to Tensors A tensor

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12:35

“Testing Gemini models for scheming tendencies” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/31

As AI models become increasingly capable and autonomous, keeping them safely aligned with human intentions is critical. Extending our previous work on evaluating scheming capabilities, we introduce complementary approaches to test whether AI models would sabotage their own safeguards, if given the opportunity. Our new papers focus on propensity for scheming: when models are deployed as coding agents, will they take opportunities to undermine the safeguards designed to oversee them? We tackle this

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86:14

“Comment on “Banning Said Achmiz”” by Zack_M_Davis

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/30

1. Prologue "If I Can't Explain It to Said Achmiz, I Probably Don't Understand It" This post isn't really about him, but I'd like to begin with a tribute to my friend Said Achmiz, the wisest person I know. The choice of adjective is deliberately chosen as term of art. Achmiz is not the most quick-witted, nor the most knowledgable, nor the most creative, nor the most savvy. I say wise because the nature of his peculiar talent is the same one ascribed to Socrates: he knows what he doesn't know.

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4:54

“Announcing: Iliad’s Fall 2026 Programs” by David...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/30

The April 2026 Iliad Intensive cohort, at LISA Iliad, an umbrella organization for applied math for AI alignment, is running several additional programs through the end of the year! Applications to all of them are now open, here. August 2026 Iliad Intensive Location: Lighthaven, Berkeley, USA Duration: August 10–28, 2026 (inclusive) Travel-and-Housing Support: $5,000 (USD) total travel-and-housing allowance Application Deadline: June 22 EoD AoE; open now Description: A special, accelerated 3-week

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