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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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37:45

“How AI Is Learning to Think in Secret” by Nicholas...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/06

On Thinkish, Neuralese, and the End of Readable Reasoning In September 2025, researchers published the internal monologue of OpenAI's GPT-o3 as it decided to lie about scientific data. This is what it thought: Pardon? This looks like someone had a stroke during a meeting they didn’t want to be in, but their hand kept taking notes. That transcript comes from a recent paper published by researchers at Apollo Research and OpenAI on catching AI systems scheming. To understand what's happening here -

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5:38

“On Owning Galaxies” by Simon Lermen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/06

It seems to be a real view held by serious people that your OpenAI shares will soon be tradable for moons and galaxies. This includes eminent thinkers like Dwarkesh Patel, Leopold Aschenbrenner, perhaps Scott Alexander and many more. According to them, property rights will survive an AI singularity event and soon economic growth is going to make it possible for individuals to own entire galaxies in exchange for some AI stocks. It follows that we should now seriously think through how we can equally

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23:02

“Exploring Reinforcement Learning Effects on...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/06

This project was conducted as part of the SPAR Fall 2025 cohort. TL;DR Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring may serve as a core pillar for AI safety if further advancements in AI capabilities do not significantly degrade the monitorability of LLM serial reasoning. As such, we studied the effects of several reinforcement learning (RL) training pressures – sampling temperature, KL divergence penalties/rewards, and length budgets – on monitorability, focusing specifically on whether they induce

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16:25

“Oversight Assistants: Turning Compute into...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/06

Currently, we primarily oversee AI with human supervision and human-run experiments, possibly augmented by off-the-shelf AI assistants like ChatGPT or Claude. At training time, we run RLHF, where humans (and/or chat assistants) label behaviors with whether they are good or not. Afterwards, human researchers do additional testing to surface and evaluate unwanted behaviors, possibly assisted by a scaffolded chat agent.The problem with primarily human-driven oversight is that it is not scalable: as

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26:49

“Axiological Stopsigns” by JenniferRM

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/06

Epistemic Status: I wrote the bones of this on August 1st, 2022. I re-read and edited it and added an (unnecessary?) section or three at the end very recently. Possibly useful as a reference. Funny to pair with "semantic stopsigns" (which are an old piece of LW jargon that people rarely use these days). You might be able to get the idea just from the title of the post <3 I'll say this fast, and then offer extended examples, and then go on at length with pointers into deep literatures which I

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5:11

“Claude Wrote Me a 400-Commit RSS Reader App” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/06

In the last few weeks, I've been playing around with the newest version of Claude Code, which wrote me a read-it-later service including RSS, email newsletters and an Android app. Software engineering experience was useful, since I did plan out a lot of the high-level design and data model and sometimes push for simpler designs. Overall though, I mostly felt like a product manager trying to specify features as quickly as possible. While software engineering is more than coding, I'm starting to

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5:04

[Linkpost] “The Thinking Machine” by PeterMcCluskey

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/06

This is a link post. Book review: The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip, by Stephen Witt. This is a well-written book about the rise of deep learning, and the man who is the most responsible for building the hardware that it needs. Building the Foundations Nvidia was founded in 1993 by three engineers. They failed to articulate much of a business plan, but got funding anyway due to the reputation that Jensen had developed while working for LSI Logic.

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9:09

“The economy is a graph, not a pipeline” by anithite

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/06

Summary: Analysis claiming that automating X% of the economy can only boost GDP by 1/(1-X) assumes all sectors must scale proportionally. The economy is a graph of processes, not a pipeline. Subgraphs can grow independently if they don't bottleneck on inputs from non-growing sectors. AI-driven automation of physical production could create a nearly self-contained subgraph that grows at rates bounded only by raw material availability and speed of production equipment. Models being challenged:

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31:56

“Dos Capital” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/06

This week, Philip Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel wrote Capital in the 22nd Century. One of my goals for Q1 2026 is to write unified explainer posts for all the standard economic debates around potential AI futures in a systematic fashion. These debates tend to repeatedly cover the same points, and those making economic arguments continuously assume you must be misunderstanding elementary economic principles, or failing to apply them for no good reason. Key assumptions are often unstated and even

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55:14

“The Technology of Liberalism” by L Rudolf L

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/05

Originally published in No Set Gauge.Dido Building Carthage, J. M. W. Turner In every technological revolution, we face a choice: build for freedom or watch as others build for control. -Brendan McCord There are two moral frames that explain modern moral advances: utilitarianism and liberalism. Utilitarianism says: “the greatest good for the greatest number”. It says we should maximize welfare, whatever that takes. Liberalism says: “to each their own sphere of freedom”. We should grant everyone

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1:44

“AI Risk timelines: 10% chance (by year X) should be...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/05

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) poses an extinction risk to all known biological life. Given the stakes involved -- the whole world -- we should be looking at 10% chance-of-AGI-by timelines as the deadline for catastrophe prevention (a global treaty banning superintelligent AI), rather than 50% (median) chance-of-AGI-by timelines, which seem to be the default[1].It's way past crunch time already: 10% chance of AGI this year![2] Given alignment/control is not going to be solved in 2026, and if

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3:28

“The inaugural Redwood Research podcast” by Buck,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/05

After five months of me (Buck) being slow at finishing up the editing on this, we’re finally putting out our inaugural Redwood Research podcast. I think it came out pretty well—we discussed a bunch of interesting and underdiscussed topics and I’m glad to have a public record of a bunch of stuff about our history. Tell your friends! Whether we do another one depends on how useful people find this one. You can watch on Youtube here, or as a Substack podcast. Notes on editing the podcast with Claude

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13:52

“In My Misanthropy Era” by jenn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/04

For the past year I've been sinking into the Great Books via the Penguin Great Ideas series, because I wanted to be conversant in the Great Conversation. I am occasionally frustrated by this endeavour, but overall, it's been fun! I'm learning a lot about my civilization and the various curmudgeons that shaped it. But one dismaying side effect is that it's also been quite empowering for my inner 13 year old edgelord. Did you know that before we invented woke, you were just allowed to be openly

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9:42

“The bio-pirate’s guide to GLP-1 agonists” by quiet_NaN

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/03

How to lose weight, infringe patents, and possibly poison yourself for 22 Euros a month. Introduction In March 2025, Scott Alexander wrote: Others are turning amateur chemist. You can order GLP-1 peptides from China for cheap. Once you have the peptide, all you have to do is put it in the right amount of bacteriostatic water. In theory this is no harder than any other mix-powder-with-water task. But this time if you do anything wrong, or are insufficiently clean, you can give yourself a

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11:50

“The Weirdness of Dating/Mating: Deep Nonconsent...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/02

Every time I see someone mention statistics on nonconsent kink online, someone else is surprised by how common it is. So let's start with some statistics from Lehmiller[1]: roughly two thirds of women and half of men have some fantasy of being raped. A lot of these are more of a rapeplay fantasy than an actual rape fantasy, but for purposes of this post we don’t need to get into those particular weeds. The important point is: the appeal of nonconsent is the baseline, not the exception, especially

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34:23

″[Advanced Intro to AI Alignment] 2. What Values May...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/02

2.1 Summary In the last post, I introduced model-based RL, which is the frame we will use to analyze the alignment problem, and we learned that the critic is trained to predict reward. I already briefly mentioned that the alignment problem is centrally about making the critic assign high value to outcomes we like and low value to outcomes we don’t like. In this post, we’re going to try to get some intuition for what values a critic may learn, and thereby also learn about some key difficulties of

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78:07

“College Was Not That Terrible Now That I’m Not That...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/02

Previously, I wrote about how I was considering going back to San Francisco State University for two semesters to finish up my Bachelor's degree in math.So, I did that. I think it was a good decision! I got more out of it than I expected. To be clear, "better than I expected" is not an endorsement of college. SF State is still the same communist dystopia I remember from a dozen years ago—a bureaucratic command economy dripping in propaganda about how indispensible and humanitarian it is, whose

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21:54

“2025 in AI predictions” by jessicata

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/02

Past years: 2023 2024 Continuing a yearly tradition, I evaluate AI predictions from past years, and collect a convenience sample of AI predictions made this year. In terms of selection, I prefer selecting specific predictions, especially ones made about the near term, enabling faster evaluation. Evaluated predictions made about 2025 in 2023, 2024, or 2025 mostly overestimate AI capabilities advances, although there's of course a selection effect (people making notable predictions about the

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6:22

“Lumenator 2.0” by Keri Warr

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/02

Late in 2019 I, like many of my rationalist friends purchased the parts for and assembled a genuine, bona fide LUMENATOR™️ - a device for greatly increasing the brightness of your home - according to the original specification. To me, lumenators are the quintessetial application of the More Dakka mindset: when you face a problem that responds positively to a little bit of X and responds even more positively to larger amounts of X, you don't just stop applying X once you feel you've done a

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9:06

“Taiwan war timelines might be shorter than AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/02

TL;DR: Most AI forecasts generally assume that if a conflict over Taiwan occurs, it will largely be about AI. I think there's a decent chance for a conflict before either side becomes substantially AGI-pilled. Thanks to Aaron Scher for comments on a draft of this post. I'm no China expert, but a lot of China experts seem pretty concerned about the possibility of a conflict over Taiwan. China is currently engaged in a massive military buildup and modernization effort, it's building specialized

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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