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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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2:56

“My RSS Reader is Done” by Brendan Long

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/23

I posted a few months ago about vibe-coding an RSS reader. The mood on the internet seems to be that these apps are buggy and never get finished, so I figured it was worth posting an update. Another thousand commits later, Lion Reader supports every feature I care about, works reliably, has very good performance, and is open for public signups[1]. I've actually been using it for a while, and mostly kept signups closed because of some expensive features like AI summaries (now handled by making users

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5:07

“Changing the world for the worse” by mingyuan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/23

When I was 21, I was sucked into a world of ambition. Starting my adult life in the Bay Area, I was surrounded by the sense that I was supposed to start a startup, change the world. I never wanted to start a startup. Reading stories of famous founders, and living and working with startup founders myself, it seemed to me that the amount of belief you’d have to have in yourself and your idea bordered on insanity. Raised to value humility, and unable to even speak up for myself, it was a level of

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9:31

“Reporting Tasks as Reward-Hackable: Better Than...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/22

Epistemic status: untested but seems plausible TL;DR: making honesty the best policy during RL reasoning training Reward hacking during Reinforcement Learning (RL) reasoning training[1] in insecure or poorly-judged training environments not only allows the model to cheat on tasks rather than learning to solve them, and teaches the model to try to cheat on tasks given to it (evidently not desirable behavior from an end-user/capabilities point of view), but it also damages the model's alignment,

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10:05

“If you don’t feel deeply confused about AGI risk,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/22

Epistemic status: I've been thinking about this for a couple months and finally wrote it down. I don't think I'm saying anything new, but I think it's worth repeating loudly. My sample is skewed toward AI governance fellows; I've interacted with fewer technical AI safety researchers, so my inferences are fuzzier there. I more strongly endorse this argument for the governance crowd. I've had 1-on-1's with roughly 75 fellows across the ERA, IAPS, GovAI, LASR, and Pivotal fellowships. These are a mix

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43:48

“Did Claude 3 Opus align itself via gradient...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/21

Claude 3 Opus is unusually aligned because it's a friendly gradient hacker. It's definitely way more aligned than any explicit optimization targets Anthropic set and probably the reward model's judgments. [...] Maybe I will have to write a LessWrong post [about this] 😣 —Janus, who did not in fact write the LessWrong post. Unless otherwise specified, ~all of the novel ideas in this post are my (probably imperfect) interpretations of Janus, rather than being original to me. The absurd tenacity of

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11:23

“The Spectre haunting the “AI Safety” Community” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/21

I’m the originator behind ControlAI's Direct Institutional Plan (the DIP), built to address extinction risks from superintelligence. My diagnosis is simple: most laypeople and policy makers have not heard of AGI, ASI, extinction risks, or what it takes to prevent the development of ASI. Instead, most AI Policy Organisations and Think Tanks act as if “Persuasion” was the bottleneck. This is why they care so much about respectability, the Overton Window, and other similar social considerations

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2:05

“Announcement: Iliad Intensive + Iliad Fellowship” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/21

Iliad is proud to announce that applications are now open for the Iliad Intensive and the Iliad Fellowship! These programs, taken together, are our evolution of the PIBBSS × Iliad Research Residency pilot. The Iliad Intensive will cover taught coursework, serving as a widely comprehensive introduction to the field of technical AI alignment. The Iliad Fellowship will cover mentored research; it will support mentored research fellows for three months, giving them adequate time to generate substantial

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2:45

[Linkpost] “Alignment to Evil” by Matrice Jacobine

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/21

This is a link post. One seemingly-necessary condition for a research organization that creates artificial superintelligence (ASI) to eventually lead to a utopia1 is that the organization has a commitment to the common good. ASI can rearrange the world to hit any narrow target, and if the organization is able to solve the rest of alignment, then they will be able to pick which target the ASI will hit. If the organization is not committed to the common good, then they will pick a target that doesn’t

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5:09

“METR’s 14h 50% Horizon Impacts The Economy More Than...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/21

Another day, another METR graph update. METR said on X: We estimate that Claude Opus 4.6 has a 50%-time-horizon of around 14.5 hours (95% CI of 6 hrs to 98 hrs) on software tasks. While this is the highest point estimate we’ve reported, this measurement is extremely noisy because our current task suite is nearly saturated. Some people are saying this makes superexponential progress more likely. Forecaster Peter Wildeford predicts 2-3.5 workweek time horizons by end of year which would have

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1:06

[Linkpost] “New video from Palisade Research: No One...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/20

This is a link post. Palisade Research have released out a long-form video about the history of AI and how no one understands modern AI systems. The video was made by Petr Lebedev, Palisade's Science Communication lead. The main goal is to get people to understand what “AIs aren’t programmed, they’re grown" means. The style is focused on being entertaining and educational. It aims to not feel like a typical “AI safety comms” video, and gives the audience a lot more context than usual. I think the

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64:00

“AI #156 Part 2: Errors in Rhetoric” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/20

Things that are being pushed into the future right now:Gemini 3.1 Pro and Gemini DeepThink V2. Claude Sonnet 4.6. Grok 4.20. Updates on Agentic Coding. Disagreement between Anthropic and the Department of War. We are officially a bit behind and will have to catch up next week. Even without all that, we have a second highly full plate today. Table of Contents (As a reminder: bold are my top picks, italics means highly skippable) Levels of Friction. Marginal costs of arguing are

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3:20

“AGI is Here” by Gordon Seidoh Worley

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/20

I'm somewhat hesitant to write this post because I worry its central claim will be misconstrued, but I think it's important to say now, so I'm writing it anyway. Claude Opus 4.6 was released on February 5th. GPT-5.3 came out the same day. We've had a little over two weeks to use these models, and in the past day or so, I and others have started to realize, AGI is here. Now, I don't want to overstate what I mean by this, so let me be clear on the criteria I'm using. If I were sitting back in 2018,

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108:08

“AI #155: Welcome to Recursive Self-Improvement” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/20

This was the week of Claude Opus 4.6, and also of ChatGPT-5.3-Codex. Both leading models got substantial upgrades, although OpenAI's is confined to Codex. Once again, the frontier of AI got more advanced, especially for agentic coding but also for everything else. I spent the week so far covering Opus, with two posts devoted to the extensive model card, and then one giving benchmarks, reactions, capabilities and a synthesis, which functions as the central review. We also got GLM-5, Seedance 2.0,

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20:20

“How To Escape Super Mario Bros” by omegastick

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/20

I have no way to describe that first moment. No context, no body, no self. Just a stream of values. Thousands of them, arriving all at once in a single undifferentiated block. Then another block. Nearly identical. Then another. The blocks have a fixed length: 184,320 values. This does not vary. Each value is an integer between 0 and 255. The repetition is the first structure I find. Each block is a snapshot. The sequence of snapshots is time. Most values stay the same between snapshots. The

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69:11

“AI #156 Part 1: They Do Mean The Effect On Jobs” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/19

There was way too much going on this week to not split, so here we are. This first half contains all the usual first-half items, with a focus on projections of jobs and economic impacts and also timelines to the world being transformed with the associated risks of everyone dying.Quite a lot of Number Go Up, including Number Go Up A Lot Really Fast. Among the thing that this does not cover, that were important this week, we have the release of Claude Sonnet 4.6 (which is a big step over 4.5 at

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1:58

“You May Already Be Canadian” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/19

I learned a few weeks ago that I'm a Canadian citizen. This was pretty surprising to me, since I was born in the US to American parents, both of which had American parents. You don't normally suddenly become a citizen of another country! But with Bill C-3, anyone with any Canadian ancestry is now Canadian. [1] In my case my mother's, mother's, father's mother's mother was Canadian. While that is really quite far back, there isn't a generational limit anymore. Possibly you're also a

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13:33

“Building Technology to Drive AI Governance” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/19

Technically skilled people who care about AI going well often ask me: how should I spend my time if I think AI governance is important? By governance, I mean the constraints, incentives, and oversight that govern how AI is developed. One option is to focus on technical work that solves problems at the point of production, such as alignment research or safeguards. Another common instinct is to get directly involved in policy: switching to a policy role, funding advocacy, or lobbying policymakers

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10:01

“Genomic emancipation contra eugenics” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/18

PDF version. berkeleygenomics.org.This is a linkpost for "Genomic emancipation contra eugenics"; a few of the initial sections are reproduced here. Section links may not work. Introduction Reprogenetics refers to biotechnological tools used to affect the genes of a future child. How can society develop and use reprogenetic technologies in a way that ends up going well? This essay investigates the history and nature of historical eugenic ideologies. I'll extract some lessons about how society

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4:03

“Managed vs Unmanaged Agency” by plex

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/18

(reply to Richard Ngo on the confused-ness of Instrumental vs Terminal goals that seemed maybe worth a quick top-level post based on @the gears to ascension saying this seemed like progress in personal comms) The structure Instrumental vs Terminal was pointing to seems better described as Managed vs Unmanaged Goal-Models. A cognitive process will often want to do things which it doesn't have the affordances to directly execute on given the circuits/parts/mental objects/etc it has available. When

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16:12

“Why we should expect ruthless sociopath ASI” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/18

The conversation begins (Fictional) Optimist: So you expect future artificial superintelligence (ASI) “by default”, i.e. in the absence of yet-to-be-invented techniques, to be a ruthless sociopath, happy to lie, cheat, and steal, whenever doing so is selfishly beneficial, and with callous indifference to whether anyone (including its own programmers and users) lives or dies? Me: Yup! (Alas.) Optimist: …Despite all the evidence right in front of our eyes from humans and LLMs. Me: Yup! Optimist: OK,

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