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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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62:12

“Bentham’s Bulldog is wrong about AI risk” by Max Harms

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/29

(...but also gets the most important part right.) Bentham's Bulldog (BB), a prominent EA/philosophy blogger, recently reviewed If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. In my eyes a review is good if it uses sound reasoning and encourages deep thinking on important topics, regardless of whether I agree with the bottom line. Bentham's Bulldog definitely encourages deep, thoughtful engagement on things that matter. He's smart, substantive, and clearly engaging in good faith. I laughed multiple times

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12:43

“How Articulate Are the Whales?” by rba

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/29

I was at a party a few years ago. It was a bunch of technical nerds. Somehow the conversation drifted to human communication with animals, Alex the grey parrot, and the famous Koko the gorilla. It wasn't in SF, so there had been cocktails, and one of the nerds (it wasn’t me) sort of cautiously asked “You guys know that stuff is completely made up, right?” He was cautious, I think, because people are extremely at ease imputing human motives and abilities to pets, cute animals, and famous gorillas

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44:35

“Open Problems With Claude’s Constitution” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/28

The first post in this series looked at the structure of Claude's Constitution.The second post in this series looked at its ethical framework. This final post deals with conflicts and open problems, starting with the first question one asks about any constitution. How and when will it be amended? There are also several specific questions. How do you address claims of authority, jailbreaks and prompt injections? What about special cases like suicide risk? How do you take Anthropic's interests

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19:07

“Anomalous Tokens on Gemini 3.0 Pro” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/28

Just now, I was working on a readme for a bioinformatics CLI utility I'm preparing to distribute. I wanted Gemini to generate manual dependency installation instructions for users who don't use mamba/conda. So in the context of the much longer conversation I was having with it about the development process, I said "give a sudo-free manual installation process." Gemini generated a crazy output, displayed below. This isn't my research area, so I thought I'd just post it here in case it was

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9:50

“Things I learned from reddit fashion” by Elizabeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/28

When it comes to clothes, I live at the “low cost/low time/low quality” end of the pareto frontier. But the bay area had a sudden attack of weather this December, and the cheap sweaters on Amazon get that way by being made of single-ply toilet paper. It became clear I would need to spend actual money to stay warm, but spending money would not be sufficient without knowledge. I used to trade money for time by buying at thrift stores. Unfortunately the efficient market has come for clothing, in

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13:35

“Thoughts on Claude’s Constitution” by Boaz Barak

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/28

[I work on the alignment team at OpenAI. However, these are my personal thoughts, and do not reflect those of OpenAI. Cross posted on WindowsOnTheory] I have read with great interest Claude's new constitution. It is a remarkable document which I recommend reading. It seems natural to compare this constitution to OpenAI's Model Spec, but while the documents have similar size and serve overlapping roles, they are also quite different. The OpenAI Model Spec is a collection of principles and rules,

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20:17

“AI found 12 of 12 OpenSSL zero-days (while curl...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/28

This is a partial follow-up to AISLE discovered three new OpenSSL vulnerabilities from October 2025. TL;DR: OpenSSL is among the most scrutinized and audited cryptographic libraries on the planet, underpinning encryption for most of the internet. They just announced 12 new zero-day vulnerabilities (meaning previously unknown to maintainers at time of disclosure). We at AISLE discovered all 12 using our AI system. This is a historically unusual count and the first real-world demonstration of

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15:28

“Clarifying how our AI timelines forecasts have...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/28

Some recent news articles discuss updates to our AI timelines since AI 2027, most notably our new timelines and takeoff model, the AI Futures Model (see blog post announcement).[1] While we’re glad to see broader discussion of the AI timelines, these articles make substantial errors in their reporting. Please don’t assume that their contents accurately represent things we’ve written or believe! This post aims to clarify our past and current views.[2] The articles in question include: The Guardian:

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4:29

“Another glimpse of the Chinese AI scene: Z.AI” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/27

Yesterday I had my first conversation (in English) with Zhipu's GLM-4.7. It was cool because I got to talk with an actual Chinese AI about topics like: the representation of Chinese AI in "AI 2027"; representations of AI in the "Culture" SF series versus the "Wandering Earth" movies; consequences of Fast Takeoff; comparisons of China and America in general; and Chinese ideas about AI society and superintelligence. (An aligned Chinese superintelligence might be a heavenly bureaucrat or a Taoist

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34:00

“The Claude Constitution’s Ethical Framework” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/27

This is the second part of my three part series on the Claude Constitution. Part one outlined the structure of the Constitution. Part two, this post, covers the virtue ethics framework that is at the center of it all, and why this is a wise approach. Part three will cover particular areas of conflict and potential improvement. One note on part 1 is that various people replied to point out that when asked in a different context, Claude will not treat FDT (functional decision theory) as obviously

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4:19

[Linkpost] “Aerodrop: far-UVC lamp giveaway” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/27

This is a link post. We're giving away 100 Aerolamp DevKits, a lamp that kills germs with far-UVC. Are you sick of getting sick in your group house? Want to test out fancy new tech that may revolutionize air safety?Claim your Aerolamp What is far-UVC? Far-UVC is a specific wavelength of ultraviolet light that kills germs, while being safe to shine on human skin. You may have heard of UV disinfection, used in eg hospitals and water treatment. Unfortunately, conventional UVC light can also cause skin

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59:39

“Dialogue: Is there a Natural Abstraction of Good?”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/27

Disclaimer: this is published without any post-processing or editing for typos after the dialogue took place.Gabriel Alfour Let's split the conversation in three parts (with no time commitment for each): 1) Exposing our Theses We start with a brief overview of our theses, just for some high-level context. 2) Probing Questions We ask each other a bunch of questions to understand our mutual points of view: probe around what we expect to be our respective blindspots. Ideally, we’d end this half with a

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114:19

“Dario Amodei – The Adolescence of Technology” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/26

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has written a new essay on his thoughts on AI risk of various shapes. It seems worth reading, even if just for understanding what Anthropic is likely to do in the future. Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan's book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity's representative to meet the

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30:49

“Claude’s Constitutional Structure” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/26

Claude's Constitution is an extraordinary document, and will be this week's focus. Its aim is nothing less than helping humanity transition to a world of powerful AI (also known variously as AGI, transformative AI, superintelligence or my current name of choice ‘sufficiently advanced AI.’ The constitution is written with Claude in mind, although it is highly readable for humans, and would serve as a fine employee manual or general set of advice for a human, modulo the parts that wouldn’t make

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21:54

“AlgZoo: uninterpreted models with fewer than 1,500...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/26

Audio note: this article contains 78 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. This post covers work done by several researchers at, visitors to and collaborators of ARC, including Zihao Chen, George Robinson, David Matolcsi, Jacob Stavrianos, Jiawei Li and Michael Sklar. Thanks to Aryan Bhatt, Gabriel Wu, Jiawei Li, Lee Sharkey, Victor Lecomte and Zihao Chen for comments. In the wake of recent debate

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26:18

“Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance” by Martin...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/26

Papal election of 1492 For over a decade, Ada Palmer, a history professor at University of Chicago (and a science-fiction writer!), struggled to teach Machiavelli. “I kept changing my approach, trying new things: which texts, what combinations, expanding how many class sessions he got…” The problem, she explains, is that “Machiavelli doesn’t unpack his contemporary examples, he assumes that you lived through it and know, so sometimes he just says things like: Some princes don’t have to work to

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4:11

“To be well-calibrated is to be punctual” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/26

To be well-calibrated is to be able to predict the world with appropriate confidence. We know that calibration can be improved through practice. Accurate calibration of our beliefs and expectations is a foundational element of epistemic rationality. Others have written in detail how to approach life with a Superforecaster mentality. I suggest a more modest practice: Always be punctual. You likely have many distinct opportunities to be on time almost every day. Each of these opportunities to be on

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16:44

“The Possessed Machines (summary)” by L Rudolf L

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/26

The Possessed Machines is one of the most important AI microsites. It was published anonymously by an ex- lab employee, and does not seem to have spread very far, likely at least partly due to this anonymity (e.g. there is no LessWrong discussion at the time I'm posting this). This post is my attempt to fix that. I do not agree with everything in the piece, but I think cultural critiques of the "AGI uniparty" are vastly undersupplied and incredibly important in modeling & fixing the current

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12:08

“Notable Progress Has Been Made in Whole Brain...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/26

Summary We have [relatively] recently scanned the whole fruit fly brain, simulated it, confirmed it is pretty highly constrained by morphology alone. Other groups have been working on optical techniques and genetic work to make the scanning process faster and simulations more accurate. Fruit Flies When You’re Having Fun The Seung Lab famously mapped the fruit fly connectome using serial section electron microscopy. What is underappreciated is that another group used this information to create a

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31:36

“A tale of three theories: sparsity, frustration, and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/25

This post is an informal preliminary writeup of a project that I've been working on with friends and collaborators. Some of the theory was developed jointly with Zohar Ringel, and we hope to write a more formal paper on it this year. Experiments are joint with Lucas Teixeira (and also Claude). This work is part of the research agenda we have been running with Lucas Teixeira and Lauren Greenspan at my organization Principles of Intelligence (formerly PIBBSS), and Lauren helped in writing this post

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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