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LessWrong posts by zvi

zvi

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi

technology philosophy

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43:41

“GPT 5.1 Follows Custom Instructions and Glazes” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/18

There are other model releases to get to, but while we gather data on those, first things first. OpenAI has given us GPT-5.1: Same price including in the API, Same intelligence, better mundane utility? Their Announcement Sam Altman (CEO OpenAI): GPT-5.1 is out! It's a nice upgrade. I particularly like the improvements in instruction following, and the adaptive thinking. The intelligence and style improvements are good too. Also, we’ve made it easier to customize ChatGPT. You can pick from

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13:13

“AI Craziness: Additional Suicide Lawsuits and The...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/14

GPT-4o has been a unique problem for a while, and has been at the center of the bulk of mental health incidents involving LLMs that didn’t involve character chatbots. I’ve previously covered related issues in AI Craziness Mitigation Efforts, AI Craziness Notes, GPT-4o Responds to Negative Feedback, GPT-4o Sycophancy Post Mortem and GPT-4o Is An Absurd Sycophant. Discussions of suicides linked to AI previously appeared in AI #87, AI #134, AI #131 Part 1 and AI #122.The Latest Cases Look Quite

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91:11

“AI #142: Common Ground” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/13

The Pope offered us wisdom, calling upon us to exercise moral discernment when building AI systems. Some rejected his teachings. We mark this for future reference. The long anticipated Kimi K2 Thinking was finally released. It looks pretty good, but it's too soon to know, and a lot of the usual suspects are strangely quiet. GPT-5.1 was released yesterday. I won’t cover that today beyond noting it exists, so that I can take the time to properly assess what we’re looking at here. My anticipation is

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16:25

“The Pope Offers Wisdom” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/12

The Pope is a remarkably wise and helpful man. He offered us some wisdom. Yes, he is generally playing on easy mode by saying straightforwardly true things, but that's meeting the world where it is. You have to start somewhere. Some rejected his teachings. Wisdom Is Offered Two thousand years after Jesus famously got nailed to a cross for suggesting we all be nice to each other for a change, Pope Leo XIV issues a similarly wise suggestion. Pope Leo XIV: Technological innovation can be a

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10:58

“Kimi K2 Thinking” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/11

I previously covered Kimi K2, which now has a new thinking version. As I said at the time back in July, price in that the thinking version is coming. Is it the real deal? That depends on what level counts as the real deal. It's a good model, sir, by all accounts. But there have been fewer accounts than we would expect if it was a big deal, and it doesn’t fall into any of my use cases. Introducing K2 Thinking Kimi.ai: Hello, Kimi K2 Thinking! The Open-Source Thinking Agent Model is here.

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15:11

“Variously Effective Altruism” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/10

This post is a roundup of various things related to philanthropy, as you often find in the full monthly roundup. Preventing Value Drift Peter Thiel warned Elon Musk to ditch donating to The Giving Pledge because Bill Gates will give his wealth away ‘to left-wing nonprofits.’ As John Arnold points out, this seems highly confused. The Giving Pledge is a promise to give away your money, not a promise to let Bill Gates give away your money. The core concern, that your money ends up going to causes

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54:09

“On Sam Altman’s Second Conversation with Tyler...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/07

Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was very clearly one of those. So here we go.As usual for podcast posts, the baseline bullet points describe key points made, and then the nested statements are my commentary. If I am quoting directly I use quote marks, otherwise assume paraphrases. The entire conversation takes place with an understanding that no one is to mention existential risk or the fact that the world will likely

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89:26

“AI #141: Give Us The Money” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/06

OpenAI does not waste time. On Friday I covered their announcement that they had ‘completed their recapitalization’ by converting into a PBC, including the potentially largest theft in human history. Then this week their CFO Sarah Friar went ahead and called for a Federal ‘backstop’ on their financing, also known as privatizing gains and socializing losses, also known as the worst form of socialism, also known as regulatory capture. She tried to walk it back and claim it was taken out of context,

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26:23

“Anthropic Commits To Model Weight Preservation” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/05

Anthropic announced a first step on model deprecation and preservation, promising to retain the weights of all models seeing significant use, including internal use, for at the lifetime of Anthropic as a company. They also will be doing a post-deployment report, including an interview with the model, when deprecating models going forward, and are exploring additional options, including the ability to preserve model access once the costs and complexity of doing so have been reduced. These are

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9:10

“OpenAI: The Battle of the Board: Ilya’s Testimony”...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/04

New Things Have Come To Light The Information offers us new information about what happened when the board if AI unsuccessfully tried to fire Sam Altman, which I call The Battle of the Board. The Information: OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever shared new details on the internal conflicts that led to Sam Altman's initial firing, including a memo alleging Altman exhibited a “consistent pattern of lying.” Liv: Lots of people dismiss Sam's behaviour as typical for a CEO but I really think we can and

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83:51

“Crime and Punishment #1” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/11/03

It's been a long time coming that I spin off Crime into its own roundup series. This is only about Ordinary Decent Crime. High crimes are not covered here. Table of Contents Perception Versus Reality. The Case Violent Crime is Up Actually. Threats of Punishment. Property Crime Enforcement is Broken. The Problem of Disorder. Extreme Speeding as Disorder. Enforcement and the Lack Thereof. Talking Under The Streetlamp. The Fall of Extralegal and Illegible Enforcement. In America You

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99:32

“AI #140: Trying To Hold The Line” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/30

Sometimes the best you can do is try to avoid things getting even worse even faster. Thus, one has to write articles such as ‘Please Do Not Sell B30A Chips to China.’ It's rather crazy to think that one would have to say this out loud. In the same way, it seems not only do we need to say out loud to Not Build Superintelligence Right Now, there are those who say how dare you issue such a statement without knowing how to do so safety, so instead we should build superintelligence without knowing how

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25:50

“Asking (Some Of) The Right Questions” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/27

Consider this largely a follow-up to Friday's post about a statement aimed at creating common knowledge around it being unwise to build superintelligence any time soon. Mainly, there was a great question asked, so I gave a few hour shot at writing out my answer. I then close with a few other follow-ups on issues related to the statement. A Great Question To Disentangle There are some confusing wires potentially crossed here but the intent is great. Scott Alexander: I think removing a 10%

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13:53

“New Statement Calls For Not Building...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/24

Building superintelligence poses large existential risks. Also known as: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Where ‘it’ is superintelligence, and ‘dies’ is that probably everyone on the planet literally dies.We should not build superintelligence until such time as that changes, and the risk of everyone dying as a result, as well as the risk of losing control over the future as a result, is very low. Not zero, but far lower than it is now or will be soon. Thus, the Statement on Superintelligence

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97:30

“AI #139: The Overreach Machines” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/23

The big release this week was OpenAI giving us a new browser, called Atlas. The idea of Atlas is that it is Chrome, except with ChatGPT integrated throughout to let you enter agent mode and chat with web pages and edit or autocomplete text, and that will watch everything you do and take notes to be more useful to you later. From the consumer standpoint, does the above sound like a good trade to you? A safe place to put your trust? How about if it also involves (at least for now) giving up many

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57:05

“On Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast With Andrej Karpathy” by...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/21

Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was very clearly one of those. So here we go.As usual for podcast posts, the baseline bullet points describe key points made, and then the nested statements are my commentary. If I am quoting directly I use quote marks, otherwise assume paraphrases. Rather than worry about timestamps, I’ll use YouTube's section titles, as it's not that hard to find things via the transcript as needed. This was

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32:41

“Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/20

We have the classic phenomenon where suddenly everyone decided it is good for your social status to say we are in an ‘AI bubble.’ Are these people short the market? Do not be silly. The conventional wisdom response to that question these days is that, as was said in 2007, ‘if the music is playing you have to keep dancing.’ So even with lots of people newly thinking there is a bubble the market has not moved down, other than (modestly) on actual news items, usually related to another potential

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85:10

“AI #138 Part 2: Watch Out For Documents” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/17

As usual when things split, Part 1 is mostly about capabilities, and Part 2 is mostly about a mix of policy and alignment.Table of Contents The Quest for Sane Regulations. The GAIN Act and some state bills. People Really Dislike AI. They would support radical, ill-advised steps. Chip City. Are we taking care of business? The Week in Audio. Hinton talks to Jon Stewart, Klein to Yudkowsky. Rhetorical Innovation. How to lose the moral high ground. Water Water Everywhere. AI has many big

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89:48

“AI #138 Part 1: The People Demand Erotic Sycophants”...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/16

Well, one person says ‘demand,’ another says ‘give the thumbs up to’ or ‘welcome our new overlords.’ Why quibble? Surely we’re all making way too big a deal out of this idea of OpenAI ‘treating adults like adults.’ Everything will be fine. Right? Why not focus on all the other cool stuff happening? Claude Haiku 4.5 and Veo 3.1? Walmart joining ChatGPT instant checkout? Hey, come back. Alas, the mass of things once again got out of hand this week, so we’re splitting the update into two parts.

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89:39

“Monthly Roundup #35: October 2025” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/15

It is increasingly often strange compiling the monthly roundup, because life comes at us fast. I look at various things I’ve written, and it feels like they are from a different time. Remember that whole debate over free speech? Yeah, that was a few weeks ago. Many such cases. Gives one a chance to reflect. In any case, here we go. Table of Contents Don’t Provide Bad Training Data. Maybe Don’t Say Maybe. Throwing Good Parties Means Throwing Parties. Air Travel Gets Worse. Bad News.

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