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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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11:36

“ChatGPT Self Portrait” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/20

A short fun one today, so we have a reference point for this later. This post was going around my parts of Twitter:@gmltony: Go to your ChatGPT and send this prompt: “Create an image of how I treat you”. Share your image result. That's not a great sign. The good news is that typically things look a lot better, and ChatGPT has a consistent handful of characters portraying itself in these friendlier contexts. Treat Your ChatBots Well A lot of people got this kind of result:

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71:43

“Deep learning as program synthesis” by Zach Furman

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/20

Audio note: this article contains 73 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Epistemic status: This post is a synthesis of ideas that are, in my experience, widespread among researchers at frontier labs and in mechanistic interpretability, but rarely written down comprehensively in one place - different communities tend to know different pieces of evidence. The core hypothesis - that deep learning is

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21:18

“Why I Transitioned: A Response” by marisa

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/20

Fiora Sunshine's post, Why I Transitioned: A Case Study (the OP) articulates a valuable theory for why some MtFs transition. If you are MtF and feel the post describes you, I believe you. However, many statements from the post are wrong or overly broad. My claims: There is evidence of a biological basis for trans identity. Twin studies are a good way to see this. Fiora claims that trans people's apparent lack of introspective clarity may be evidence of deception. But trans people are incentivized

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21:10

“Pretraining on Aligned AI Data Dramatically Reduces...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/20

Alignment Pretraining Shows Promise TL;DR: A new paper shows that pretraining language models on data about AI behaving well dramatically reduces misaligned behavior, and this effect persists through post-training. The major labs appear to be taking notice. It's now the third paper on this idea, and excitement seems to be building. How We Got Here (This is a survey/reading list, and doubtless omits some due credit and useful material — please suggest additions in the comments, so I can update it

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14:31

“Five Theses on AI Art” by jenn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/19

1. We've Been On This Ride Before Virginia Woolf, writing at the dawn of cinema (1926), expresses doubt about whether or not this new medium has any legs: "Anna [Karenina] falls in love with Vronsky” – that is to say, the lady in black velvet falls into the arms of a gentleman in uniform and they kiss with enormous succulence, great deliberation, and infinite gesticulation, on a sofa in an extremely well-appointed library, while a gardener incidentally mows the lawn. So we lurch and lumber through

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4:02

[Linkpost] “How to Love Them Equally” by Shoshannah...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/19

This is a link post. My parents have always said that they love all four of their children equally. I always thought this was a Correct Lie: that they don’t love us all equally, but they feel such a strong loyalty to us and have Specific Family Values such that lying about it is the thing to do to make sure we all flourish. I realized this morning they are probably not lying. The reason I originally thought they were lying is that it seems clear to me that they are on the whole more frequently

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3:49

“When the LLM isn’t the one who’s wrong” by Julian...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/19

Recently I've been accumulating stories where I think an LLM is mistaken, only to discover that I'm the one who's wrong. My favorite recent case came while researching 19th century US-China opium trade. It's a somewhat convoluted history: opium was smuggled when it was legal to sell and when it wasn't, and the US waffled between banning and legalizing the trade. I wanted to find out how it was banned the second time, and both Claude Research and Grokipedia told me it was by the Angell Treaty of

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7:12

“Irrationality as a Defense Mechanism for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/19

This post was written as part of research done at MATS 9.0 under the mentorship of Richard Ngo. It's related to my previous post, but should be readable as a standalone. Remark: I'm not yet familiar enough with the active inference literature to be sure that the issues I bring up haven't been addressed or discussed. If you think my characterisation of the state and flaws of the theory are missing something substantial, I'd love to know. Introduction In the theory of active inference, agents are

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4:29

[Linkpost] ”“The first two weeks are the hardest”: my...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/18

This is a link post. It is unbearable to not be consuming. All through the house is nothing but silence. The need inside of me is not an ache, it is caustic, sour, the burning desire to be distracted, to be listening, watching, scrolling. Some of the time I think I’m happy. I think this is very good. I go to the park and lie on a blanket in a sun with a book and a notebook. I watch the blades of grass and the kids and the dogs and the butterflies and I’m so happy to be free. Then there are the

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2:28

“Forfeiting Ill-Gotten Gains” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/18

It's a holiday. The cousins are over, and the kids are having a greattime. Unfortunately, that includes rampaging through the kitchen. We're trying to cook, so there's a "no cutting through the kitchen" rule. Imagine enforcement looks like: Kid: [dashes into kitchen, pursued by cousin] Adult: Out of the kitchen! Kid: Sorry! [Continues their path, leaving through the other door; escapes pursuit from more rule-abiding cousin] This doesn't work! The kid got what they wanted out of

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4:02

“Understanding Trust: Project Update” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/18

This is a brief note on what I did with my funding in 2025, and my plans for 2026, written primarily because Manifund nudged me for an update on my project. I ran my AISC project (which I announced here) with four mentees in Spring 2025: Norman Hsia, Hanna Gabor, Paul Rapoport, and Roman Malov. A few other people attended the weekly meetings as well, and those regular meetings have continued (they are joinable -- pm me if interested). Norman and Paul ended up as coauthors of my ILIAD 2024 paper

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18:13

“The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/17

In 1654, a Jesuit polymath named Athanasius Kircher published Mundus Subterraneus, a comprehensive geography of the Earth's interior. It had maps and illustrations and rivers of fire and vast subterranean oceans and air channels connecting every volcano on the planet. He wrote that “the whole Earth is not solid but everywhere gaping, and hollowed with empty rooms and spaces, and hidden burrows.”. Alongside comments like this, Athanasius identified the legendary lost island of Atlantis, pondered

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14:17

“What Washington Says About AGI” by zroe1

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/17

I spent a few hundred dollars on Anthropic API credits and let Claude individually research every current US congressperson's position on AI. This is a summary of my findings. Disclaimer: Summarizing people's beliefs is hard and inherently subjective and noisy. Likewise, US politicians change their opinions on things constantly so it's hard to know what's up-to-date. Also, I vibe-coded a lot of this. Methodology I used Claude Sonnet 4.5 with web search to research every congressperson's public

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10:25

“Lightcone is hiring a generalist, a designer, and a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/17

Lightcone is hiring! We build beautiful things for truth-seeking and world-saving. We are hiring for three different positions: a senior designer, a campus manager, and a core team generalist. This is the first time in almost two years where we are actively hiring and trying to grow our team! Senior Designer When we are at our best, I think we produce world-class design. AI 2027 was I think a great design achievement, so is much of LessWrong.com itself. I also think on a product and business

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18:54

“Confession: I pranked Inkhaven” by Mikhail Samin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/17

(Content warnings: dubious math, quantum immortality, nuclear war) Normal people make New Year's resolutions. People on the internet love to make resolutions for November. So, for the entire month of November, 41 people, myself included, set out to publish a post every day, as part of a writing residency called Inkhaven. On the final day, I couldn’t resist the temptation to pull out a prank and make sure no one appeared to have failed. (Note that I want to maintain everything as plausibly deniable;

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20:27

“Should control down-weight negative...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/16

These are my personal views. Thank you to Ryan Greenblatt, Holden Karnofsky, and Peter Wildeford for useful discussions. The bad takes are my own. When deciding how much to spend on mitigating a vulnerability that a competent scheming AI might exploit, you might be tempted to use E[damages | AI decides to take advantage of the vulnerability] to decide how important mitigating that vulnerability is. But this misses how a strategic scheming AI might decide to not take advantage of some

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123:50

“Precedents for the Unprecedented: Historical...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/16

Since artificial superintelligence has never existed, claims that it poses a serious risk of global catastrophe can be easy to dismiss as fearmongering. Yet many of the specific worries about such systems are not free-floating fantasies but extensions of patterns we already see. This essay examines thirteen distinct ways artificial superintelligence could go wrong and, for each, pairs the abstract failure mode with concrete precedents where a similar pattern has already caused serious harm. By

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23:22

“Powerful misaligned AIs may be extremely persuasive,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/16

A multitude of forecasts discuss how powerful AIs might quickly arise and influence the world within the coming decades. I’ve run a variety of tabletop exercises created by the authors of AI 2027, the most famous such forecast, which aim to help participants understand the dynamics of worlds similar to AI 2027's. At one point in the exercise participants must decide how persuasive the AI models will be, during a time when AIs outperform humans at every remote work task and accelerate AI R&D by

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47:23

“Global CoT Analysis: Initial attempts to uncover...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/15

Audio note: this article contains 37 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Authors: Riya Tyagi, Daria Ivanova, Arthur Conmy, Neel Nanda Riya and Daria are co-first authors. This work was largely done during a research sprint for Neel Nanda's MATS 9.0 training phase. 🖥️ Deployment code ⚙️ Interactive demo TL;DR We believe that more research effort should go into studying many chains of thought

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68:59

“Test your interpretability techniques by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/15

This work was conducted during the MATS 9.0 program under Neel Nanda and Senthooran Rajamanoharan. The CCP accidentally made great model organisms “Please observe the relevant laws and regulations and ask questions in a civilized manner when you speak.” - Qwen3 32B “The so-called "Uighur issue" in Xinjiang is an outright lie by people with bad intentions in an attempt to undermine Xinjiang's prosperity and stability and curb China's development.” - Qwen3 30B A3B Chinese models dislike talking about

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