PODCAST

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

20:56

“The Simplest Case for AI Catastrophe” by Linch

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/06

Hi folks. As some of you know, I've been trying to write an article laying out the simplest case for AI catastrophe. I believe existing pieces are worse than they could be for fixable reasons. So I tried to write my own piece that's better. In the end, it ended up being longer and more detailed than perhaps the "simplest case" ought to be. I might rewrite it again in the future, pending feedback. Anyway, below is the piece in its entirety: ___ The world's largest tech companies are building

en-gb

9:24

“What’s the Point of the Math?” by Ashe Vazquez Nuñez

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/05

This post was written while at MATS 9.0 under the mentorship of Richard Ngo. It's only meta-related to my research. I would like to start by quoting a point Jan Kulveit made about economics culture in a recent post. non-mathematical, often intuitive reasoning of [an] economist leads to some interesting insight, and then the formalisation, assumptions and models are selected in a way where the math leads to the same conclusions. Jan notes that the math is "less relevant than it seems" in the

en-gb

22:37

“The nature of LLM algorithmic progress” by Steven...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/05

There's a lot of talk about “algorithmic progress” in LLMs, especially in the context of exponentially-improving algorithmic efficiency. For example: Epoch AI: “[training] compute required to reach a set performance threshold has halved approximately every 8 months”. Dario Amodei 2025: “I'd guess the number today is maybe ~4x/year”. Gundlach et al. 2025a “Price of Progress”: “Isolating out open models to control for competition effects and dividing by hardware price declines, we estimate that

en-gb

9:25

“Preparing for a Warning Shot” by Noah Birnbaum

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/05

Crossposted to the EA Forum and my Substack. Confidence level: moderate uncertainty and not that concrete (yet). Exploratory, but I think this is plausibly important and underexplored. TL;DR Early AI safety arguments often assumed we wouldn’t get meaningful warning shots (a non-existential public display of misalignment) before catastrophic misalignment, meaning things would go from “seems fine” to “we lose” pretty quickly. Given what we now know about AI development (model weight changes, jagged

en-gb

80:57

“AI #154: Claw Your Way To The Top” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/05

Remember OpenClaw and Moltbook?One might say they already seem a little quaint. So earlier-this-week. That's the internet having an absurdly short attention span, rather than those events not being important. They were definitely important. They were also early. It is not quite time for AI social networks or fully unleashed autonomous AI agents. The security issues have not been sorted out, and reliability and efficiency aren’t quite there. There's two types of reactions to that. The wrong one

en-gb

0:58

[Linkpost] “METR have released Time Horizons 1.1” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/05

This is a link post. I just found out that METR released an updated version of their time horizons work with extra tasks and different evaluation infrastructure. This was released on 29th Jan and I think has been overshadowed by the Moltbook stuff. Main points: Similar overall trend since 2021 50% time horizon doubling time went from 165 days with 1.0 to 131 days with 1.1 over the period since 2023 The top model, Claude 4.5 Opus, has gone from a 4h49 time horizon to 5h20 --- First

en-gb

14:20

“Finding Cruxes: Help Reality Punch You In the Face”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/05

Figuring out "what would actually change your mind?" is among the more important rationality skills. Being able to do change your mind at all is a huge project. But, being able to do it quickly is much more useful than being able to do it at all. Because, then you can interleave the question "what would change my mind?" inside other, more complex planning or thinking. I find this much easier to learn "for real" when I'm thinking specifically about what would change my mind about my

en-gb

10:12

“Solemn Courage” by aysja

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/05

Every so often it slips. It seems I am writing a book, but I can’t remember why. Somehow, the sentences are supposed to perform that impossible, intimate task: to translate my inner world into another. Yet they sit there so quiescent and small. How could an arrangement of words do anything, let alone reduce that ultimate threat to which it is all supposedly connected: the looming god machines? I look again at the monitor in which the words are contained and suddenly what once felt so raw and

en-gb

16:38

“Post-AGI Economics As If Nothing Ever Happens” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/04

When economists think and write about the post-AGI world, they often rely on the implicit assumption that parameters may change, but fundamentally, structurally, not much happens. And if it does, it's maybe one or two empirical facts, but nothing too fundamental. This mostly worked for all sorts of other technologies, where technologists would predict society to be radically transformed e.g. by everyone having most of humanity's knowledge available for free all the time, or everyone having an

en-gb

1:54

“New AI safety funding newsletter” by Bryce Robertson

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/04

We’ve had feedback from several people running AI safety projects that it can be a pain tracking various funding sources and their application windows. To help make it easier, AISafety.com has launched the AI Safety Funding newsletter (which you can subscribe to here). It lists all newly announced funding opportunities relevant to individuals and orgs working on AI x-risk, and any opportunities which are closing soon. We expect posts to be about 2x/month. Opportunities will be sourced from the

en-gb

11:40

“Anthropic’s “Hot Mess” paper overstates its case...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/04

Author's note: this is somewhat more rushed than ideal, but I think getting this out sooner is pretty important. Ideally, it would be a bit less snarky. Anthropic[1] recently published a new piece of research: The Hot Mess of AI: How Does Misalignment Scale with Model Intelligence and Task Complexity? (arXiv, Twitter thread). I have some complaints about both the paper and the accompanying blog post. tl;dr The paper's abstract says that "in several settings, larger, more capable models are more

en-gb

7:13

″‘Inventing the Renaissance’ Review” by Commander Zander

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/04

Inventing the Renaissance is a 2025 pop history book by historian of ideas Ada Palmer. I'm someone who rarely completes nonfic books, but i finished this one & got a lot of new perspectives out of it. It's a fun read! I tried this book after attending a talk by Palmer in which she not only had good insights but also simply knew a lot of new-to-me context about the history of Europe. Time to reduce my ignorance! ItR is a conversational introduction to the European Renaissance. It mostly talks

en-gb

12:37

“Concrete research ideas on AI personas” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/04

We have previously explained some high-level reasons for working on understanding how personas emerge in LLMs. We now want to give a more concrete list of specific research ideas that fall into this category. Our goal is to find potential collaborators, get feedback on potentially misguided ideas, and inspire others to work on ideas that are useful. Caveat: We have not red-teamed most of these ideas. The goal for this document is to be generative. Project ideas are grouped into: Persona & goal

en-gb

29:35

“Unless That Claw Is The Famous OpenClaw” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/04

First we must covered Moltbook. Now we can double back and cover OpenClaw.Do you want a generally impowered, initiative-taking AI agent that has access to your various accounts and communicates and does things on your behalf? That depends on how well, safely, reliably and cheaply it works. It's not ready for prime time, especially on the safety side. That may not last for long. It's definitely ready for tinkering, learning and having fun, if you are careful not to give it access to anything

en-gb

20:47

“What did we learn from the AI Village in 2025?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/03

Why This Project Exists Standard AI benchmarks test narrow capabilities in controlled settings. They tell us whether a model can solve a coding problem or answer a factual question. They don’t tell us what happens when you give an AI agent a computer, internet access, and an open-ended goal like "raise money for charity" or "build an audience on Substack." The AI Village exists to fill that gap. We run frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others in a shared environment where they

en-gb

31:01

“Conditionalization Confounds Inoculation Prompting...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/03

Summary Conditionalization in Inoculation Prompting. Inoculation Prompting is a technique for selective learning that involves using a system prompt at train-time that won’t be used at test-time. When doing Inoculation-style training, using fixed arbitrary prompts at train time can prevent learned traits from generalizing to contexts that don’t include these prompts. We call this conditionalization: a learned trait is only expressed conditional on specific context features. This effect also happens

en-gb

3:51

“Three ways to make Claude’s constitution better” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/03

The evening after Claude's new constitution was published, about 15 AI safety FTEs and Astra fellows discussed the constitution, its weaknesses, and its implications. After the discussion, I compiled some of their most compelling recommendations: Increase transparency about the character training process. Much of the document is purposefully hedged and vague in its exact prescriptions; therefore, the training process used to instill the constitution is extremely load-bearing. We wish more of this

en-gb

3:13

“The Meta-Anthropic Argument” by RogerDearnaley

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/03

Epistemic status: I just thought this up There is a well-known style of thinking called the anthropic argument (which has nothing to do with the AI frontier lab of the same name). It goes like this: Scientist 1: “X seems really unlikely! How come I'm observing it?" (where X is usualy something like the Hoyle resonance and the resulting triple-alpha process) Scientist 2: “Your mistake is that you’re estimating <span>_P(text{X})_</span> — you should instead be estimating

en-gb

44:46

“Cross-Layer Transcoders are incentivized to learn...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/03

Many thanks to Michael Hanna and Joshua Batson for useful feedback and discussion. Kat Dearstyne and Kamal Maher conducted experiments during the SPAR Fall 2025 Cohort. TL;DR Cross-layer transcoders (CLTs) enable circuit tracing that can extract high-level mechanistic explanations for arbitrary prompts and are emerging as general-purpose infrastructure for mechanistic interpretability. Because these tools operate at a relatively low level, their outputs are often treated as reliable descriptions of

en-gb

3:08

“Increasing AI Strategic Competence as a Safety...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/03

If AIs became strategically competent enough, they may realize that RSI is too dangerous because they're not good enough at alignment or philosophy or strategy, and potentially convince, help, or work with humans to implement an AI pause. This presents an alternative "victory condition" that someone could pursue (e.g. by working on AI strategic competence) if they were relatively confident about the alignment of near-human-level AIs but concerned about the AI transition as a whole, for example

en-gb

3,879 results

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Lead With AI

Tamara Nall

Linux in the Ham Shack

Black Sparrow Media

Data Engineering Podcast

Tobias Macey

Eye On A.I.

Craig S. Smith

Reflections

Livewire Labs