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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.If you"d like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

5:55

“Applying traditional economic thinking to AGI: a...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/01/14

Traditional economics thinking has two strong principles, each based on abundant historical data: Principle (A): No “lump of labor”: If human population goes up, there might be some wage drop in the very short term, because the demand curve for labor slopes down. But in the longer term, people will find new productive things to do, such that human labor will retain high value. Indeed, if anything, the value of labor will go up, not down—for example, dense cities are engines of economic growth...

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57:25

“Passages I Highlighted in The Letters of...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/01/14

All quotes, unless otherwise marked, are Tolkien's words as printed in The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition. All emphases mine. Machinery is Power is EvilWriting to his son Michael in the RAF:[here is] the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving mach...

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14:50

“Parkinson’s Law and the Ideology of Statistics” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/01/13

The anonymous review of The Anti-Politics Machine published on Astral Codex X focuses on a case study of a World Bank intervention in Lesotho, and tells a story about it:The World Bank staff drew reasonable-seeming conclusions from sparse data, and made well-intentioned recommendations on that basis. However, the recommended programs failed, due to factors that would have been revealed by a careful historical and ethnographic investigation of the area in question. Therefore, we should spend m...

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25:11

“Capital Ownership Will Not Prevent Human...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/01/11

Crossposted from my personal blog. I was inspired to cross-post this here given the discussion that this post on the role of capital in an AI future elicited.When discussing the future of AI, I semi-often hear an argument along the lines that in a slow takeoff world, despite AIs automating increasingly more of the economy, humanity will remain in the driving seat because of its ownership of capital. This world posits one where humanity effectively becomes a rentier class living well off the v...

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15:56

“Activation space interpretability may be doomed” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/01/10

TL;DR: There may be a fundamental problem with interpretability work that attempts to understand neural networks by decomposing their individual activation spaces in isolation: It seems likely to find features of the activations - features that help explain the statistical structure of activation spaces, rather than features of the model - the features the model's own computations make use of.Written at Apollo Research IntroductionClaim: Activation space interpretability is likely to give us ...

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8:40

“What o3 Becomes by 2028” by Vladimir_Nesov

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/01/09

Funding for $150bn training systems just turned less speculative, with OpenAI o3 reaching 25% on FrontierMath, 70% on SWE-Verified, 2700 on Codeforces, and 80% on ARC-AGI. These systems will be built in 2026-2027 and enable pretraining models for 5e28 FLOPs, while o3 itself is plausibly based on an LLM pretrained only for 8e25-4e26 FLOPs. The natural text data wall won't seriously interfere until 6e27 FLOPs, and might be possible to push until 5e28 FLOPs. Scaling of pretraining won't end just...

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25:26

“What Indicators Should We Watch to Disambiguate AGI...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/01/09

(Cross-post from https://amistrongeryet.substack.com/p/are-we-on-the-brink-of-agi, lightly edited for LessWrong. The original has a lengthier introduction and a bit more explanation of jargon.)No one seems to know whether transformational AGI is coming within a few short years. Or rather, everyone seems to know, but they all have conflicting opinions. Have we entered into what will in hindsight be not even the early stages, but actually the middle stage, of the mad tumbling rush into singular...

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78:48

“How will we update about scheming?” by ryan_greenblatt

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/01/08

I mostly work on risks from scheming (that is, misaligned, power-seeking AIs that plot against their creators such as by faking alignment). Recently, I (and co-authors) released "Alignment Faking in Large Language Models", which provides empirical evidence for some components of the scheming threat model.One question that's really important is how likely scheming is. But it's also really important to know how much we expect this uncertainty to be resolved by various key points in the future. ...

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20:22

“OpenAI #10: Reflections” by Zvi

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/01/08

This week, Altman offers a post called Reflections, and he has an interview in Bloomberg. There's a bunch of good and interesting answers in the interview about past events that I won’t mention or have to condense a lot here, such as his going over his calendar and all the meetings he constantly has, so consider reading the whole thing. Table of Contents The Battle of the Board.Altman Lashes Out.Inconsistently Candid.On Various People Leaving OpenAI.The Pitch.Great Expectations.Accusations of...

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2:15

“Maximizing Communication, not Traffic” by jefftk

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/01/07

As someone who writes for fun, I don't need to get people onto my site: If I write a post and some people are able to get the core ideajust from the title or a tweet-length summary, great!I can include the full contents of my posts in my RSS feed andon FB, because so what if people read the whole post there and neverclick though to my site?It would be different if I funded my writing through ads (maximizetime on site to maximize impressions) or subscriptions (get the chanceto pitch, probably ...

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44:21

“What’s the short timeline plan?” by Marius Hobbhahn

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/01/02

This is a low-effort post. I mostly want to get other people's takes and express concern about the lack of detailed and publicly available plans so far. This post reflects my personal opinion and not necessarily that of other members of Apollo Research. I’d like to thank Ryan Greenblatt, Bronson Schoen, Josh Clymer, Buck Shlegeris, Dan Braun, Mikita Balesni, Jérémy Scheurer, and Cody Rushing for comments and discussion.I think short timelines, e.g. AIs that can replace a top researcher at an ...

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117:07

“Shallow review of technical AI safety, 2024” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/30

from aisafety.world The following is a list of live agendas in technical AI safety, updating our post from last year. It is “shallow” in the sense that 1) we are not specialists in almost any of it and that 2) we only spent about an hour on each entry. We also only use public information, so we are bound to be off by some additional factor. The point is to help anyone look up some of what is happening, or that thing you vaguely remember reading about; to help new researchers orient and know (...

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28:44

“By default, capital will matter more than ever after...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/29

I've heard many people say something like "money won't matter post-AGI". This has always struck me as odd, and as most likely completely incorrect.First: labour means human mental and physical effort that produces something of value. Capital goods are things like factories, data centres, and software—things humans have built that are used in the production of goods and services. I'll use "capital" to refer to both the stock of capital goods and to the money that can pay for them. I'll say "mo...

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39:20

“Review: Planecrash” by L Rudolf L

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/28

Take a stereotypical fantasy novel, a textbook on mathematical logic, and Fifty Shades of Grey. Mix them all together and add extra weirdness for spice. The result might look a lot like Planecrash (AKA: Project Lawful), a work of fiction co-written by "Iarwain" (a pen-name of Eliezer Yudkowsky) and "lintamande".(image from Planecrash)Yudkowsky is not afraid to be verbose and self-indulgent in his writing. He previously wrote a Harry Potter fanfic that includes what's essentially an extended E...

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14:03

“The Field of AI Alignment: A Postmortem, and What To...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/26

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".Over the past few years, a major source of my relative optimism on AI has been the ...

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11:20

“When Is Insurance Worth It?” by kqr

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/23

TL;DR: If you want to know whether getting insurance is worth it, use the Kelly Insurance Calculator. If you want to know why or how, read on.Note to LW readers: this is almost the entire article, except some additional maths that I couldn't figure out how to get right in the LW editor, and margin notes. If you're very curious, read the original article! Misunderstandings about insurancePeople online sometimes ask if they should get some insurance, and then other people say incorrect things, ...

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14:58

“Orienting to 3 year AGI timelines” by Nikola Jurkovic

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/23

My median expectation is that AGI[1] will be created 3 years from now. This has implications on how to behave, and I will share some useful thoughts I and others have had on how to orient to short timelines.I’ve led multiple small workshops on orienting to short AGI timelines and compiled the wisdom of around 50 participants (but mostly my thoughts) here. I’ve also participated in multiple short-timelines AGI wargames and co-led one wargame.This post will assume median AGI timelines of 2027 a...

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9:26

“What Goes Without Saying” by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/21

There are people I can talk to, where all of the following statements are obvious. They go without saying. We can just “be reasonable” together, with the context taken for granted.And then there are people who…don’t seem to be on the same page at all. There's a real way to do anything, and a fake way; we need to make sure we’re doing the real version.Concepts like Goodhart's Law, cargo-culting, greenwashing, hype cycles, Sturgeon's Law, even bullshit jobs1 are all pointing at the basic unders...

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0:47

“o3” by Zach Stein-Perlman

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/21

I'm editing this post.OpenAI announced (but hasn't released) o3 (skipping o2 for trademark reasons).It gets 25% on FrontierMath, smashing the previous SoTA of 2%. (These are really hard math problems.) Wow.72% on SWE-bench Verified, beating o1's 49%.Also 88% on ARC-AGI. --- First published: December 20th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ao4enANjWNsYiSFqc/o3 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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11:40

“‘Alignment Faking’ frame is somewhat fake” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/12/21

I like the research. I mostly trust the results. I dislike the 'Alignment Faking' name and frame, and I'm afraid it will stick and lead to more confusion. This post offers a different frame. The main way I think about the result is: it's about capability - the model exhibits strategic preference preservation behavior; also, harmlessness generalized better than honesty; and, the model does not have a clear strategy on how to deal with extrapolating conflicting values. What happened in this fr...

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