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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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3:40

“The quest for general intelligence is hitting a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/02

There has been a lot of talk in the AI community lately about the possibility of achieving general intelligence. Indeed, recent progress in areas such as mathematical problem solving and coding has been dramatic, with recent systems assisting in the creation of platforms such as Moltbook and helping an AI researcher in discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms. Despite the hype, however, it seems like there are clear limitations to the current best non-AI systems: They cannot perform

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10:45

“Intelligence Dissolves Privacy” by Vaniver

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/02

The future is going to be different from the present. Let's think about how. Specifically, our expectations about what's reasonable are downstream of our past experiences, and those experiences were downstream of our options (and the options other people in our society had). As those options change, so too our experiences, and our expectations of what's reasonable. I once thought it was reasonable to pick up the phone and call someone, and to pick up my phone when it rang; things have changed, and

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25:06

“Anthropic’s Pause is the Most Expensive Alarm in...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/02

Imagine Apple halting iPhone production because studies linked smartphones to teen suicide rates. Imagine Pfizer proactively pulling Lipitor because of internal studies showing increased cardiac risk, and not because of looming settlements or FDA injunction, just for the health of patients. Or imagine if in 1952, Philip Morris halted expansion and stopped advertising when Wynder & Graham first showed heavy smokers had significantly elevated rates of lung cancer. It wouldn't happen

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17:58

“I’m Suing Anthropic for Unauthorized Use of My...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/02

Last year, I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop Caffe Strada, sipping on a matcha latte and writing a self-insert fanfic about how our plucky protagonist escapes the mind-controlling clutches of an evil anti-animal welfare company, when I came across an interesting article on AI character. The core argument is that when you train an AI to be helpful, honest, and ethical, the AI model doesn’t just learn those rules as abstract instructions. Instead, it infers an entire persona from cultural

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9:27

“Orders of magnitude: use semitones, not decibels” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/02

I'm going to teach you a secret. It's a secret known to few, a secret way of using parts of your brain not meant for mathematics... for mathematics. It's part of how I (sort of) do logarithms in my head. This is a nearly purposeless skill.What's the growth rate? What's the doubling time? How many orders of magnitude bigger is it? How many years at this rate until it's quintupled? All questions of ratios and scale. Scale... hmm. 'Wait', you're thinking, 'let me check the date...'. Indeed. But

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6:12

“Dying with Whimsy” by NickyP

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/02

To me it feels pretty emotionally clear we are nearing the end-times with AI. That in 1-4 years[1] things will be radically transformed, that at least one the big AI labs will become autonomous research organizations working on developing the next version on AI, perhaps with some narrow guidance of humans in oversight or acquisition of more resources until robotics is solved too. And i believe there will be some nice benefits at first with this, with the AI organizations providing many goods and

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17:50

“AI for AI for Epistemics” by owencb, Lukas Finnveden

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

We feel conscious that rapid AI progress could transform all sorts of cause areas. But we haven’t previously analysed what this means for AI for epistemics, a field close to our hearts. In this article, we attempt to rectify this oversight. Summary AI-powered tools and services that help people figure out what's true (“AI for epistemics”) could matter a lot. As R&D is increasingly automated, AI systems will play a larger role in the process of developing such AI-based epistemic tools. This has

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9:22

“Announcing Doublehaven with Reflections on Humour”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

Inkhaven is a writers’ retreat, well, really it's a bloggers’ retreat. In the Lighthaven campus, Berkeley, a couple dozen bloggers get together to complete an almost insurmountable challenge for us mere mortals. Post one blogpost every single day for a whole month. I say ‘insurmountable’ but in fact they all succeeded last time, although apparently it was not uncommon for them to claw success from the jaws of defeat at 11:45 pm each night. I look at this and I feel the same way that traditionalists

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46:47

“Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy v3: A Matter of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

Anthropic has revised its Responsible Scaling Policy to v3.The changes involved include abandoning many previous commitments, including one not to move ahead if doing so would be dangerous, citing that given competition they feel blindly following such a principle would not make the world safer. Holden Karnofsky advocated for the changes. He maintains that the previous strategy of specific commitments was in error, and instead endorses the new strategy of having aspirational goals. He was not at

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7:52

“Save the Sun Shrimp!” by Jack

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

The supposition that we live in a "goldilocks zone" is frankly just nonsense built up by an anthropocentric need to feel self-important, like Copernicus I am here to rescue us from a self-absorbed disaster of thought. Indeed, what is required for life to form is the ability to create complex structures with causal persistence times above a threshold. With this in mind we are able to find many areas where organisms could persist, if we just had the eyes to see them, namely the Sun! The surface of

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23:04

“LIMBO: Who We Are, What We Do, and an Exciting...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

We are excited to publicly introduce the Laboratory for Importance-sampled Measure and Bayesian Observation (LIMBO), a small research group working at the intersection of cosmological theory, probability, and existential risk. We believe that the mechanisms by which observers continue to exist in the universe are important, neglected, and tractable to study and influence. Since our founding in October 2024, we have developed a mathematical framework for doing anthropic reasoning about rare-event

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3:07

“Chat, is this sus?” by Tyler Tracy

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

A large assumption we have made in AI control is that humans will be perfect at auditing, that is, being shown a transcript and determining if the AI was scheming in that transcript. But we are uncertain whether humans will be perfect at auditing; they are prone to fatigue and distraction. That is why I’m releasing "Sentinel" today, an extremely high-stimulation way to audit boring transcripts. Sentinel is a revolutionary way to get more juice out of your human auditors by gamifying the auditing

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1:50

″“You Have Not Been a Good User” (LessWrong’s second...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

tldr: The Fooming Shoggoths are releasing their second album "You Have Not Been a Good User"! Available on Spotify, Youtube Music and (hopefully within a few days) Apple Music. We are also releasing a remastered version of the first album, available similarly on Spotify and Youtube Music. There's an interactive widget here in the post. It took us quite a while but the Fooming Shoggoth's second album is finally complete! We had finished 9 out of the 13 songs on this album around a year ago, but I

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3:21

“Lesswrong Liberated” by Ronny Fernandez

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

A spectre is haunting the internet—the spectre of LLMism. The history of all hitherto existing forums is the history of clashing design tastes. For the first time in history, everyone has an equal ability in design! The means of design are no longer only held in the hands of those with "good design taste". Never before have forum users been so close to being able to design their own forums--perhaps the time is upon us now! It is for this reason that I have deposed the previous acting commander of

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2:18

“The Claude Code Source Leak” by Error

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/01

(mods: I assume this is blowing up twitter and so discussing it herewon't do additional damage -- and there are already a thousand github forks -- but I am not actually on twitter, which is why I’m opening discussion here. It's possible I'm missing something. Feel free to nuke this if so.) For those that hadn't heard yet, last night Anthropic appears to have accidentally published a Claude Code update with extractable source code in it. This seems important, but I'm not sure how much so, and I

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23:46

“Experiments With Opus 4.6’s Fiction” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/31

The Unslop prize has reminded me of my terrified fascination with AI Generated fiction. I have come to identify more as a writer since my post from last year when I posted Experiments With Sonnet 4.5's Fiction, and so have avoided repeating the experiment with Opus 4.6 - mostly out of terror. However, a new, smarter Claude is on the way (and The Unslop prize will force me to learn anyway - as I will not be able to resist reading the winning entry) - so it seems like time to do so. In my last post,

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15:02

“Movie Review: The AI Doc” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/31

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a brilliant piece of work. (This will be a fully spoilorific overview. If you haven’t seen The AI Doc,I recommend seeing it, it is about as good as it could realistically have been, in most ways.) Like many things, it only works because it is centrally real. The creator of the documentary clearly did get married and have a child, freak out about AI, ask questions of the right people out of worry about his son's future, freak out even more now

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4:21

“Product Alignment is not Superintelligence Alignment...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/31

tl;dr: progress on making Claude friendly[1] is not the same as progress on making it safe to build godlike superintelligence. solving the former does not imply we get a good future.[2] please track the difference. The term Alignment was coined[3] to point to the technical problem of understanding how to build minds such that if they were to become strongly and generally superhuman, things would go well. It has been increasingly adopted by frontier AI labs and much of the rest of the AI safety

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11:25

“Co-Found Lens Academy With Me. (We have early users...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/31

tl;dr. Lens Academy is creating scalable superingelligence x-risk education with several USPs. Current team: Luc (full time founder, technical generalist) and several part time contributors. We have users and funding. Looking for a cofounder who's either a nontechnical generalist or a technical generalist. (Drafted by human; edited by AI, re-edited by human.) Misaligned superintelligence might end humanity. The number of people who understand this deeply enough to act on it is far too small. Lens

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10:55

“Slack in Cells, Slack in Brains” by Mateusz Bagiński

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/03/31

[A veridically metaphorical explanation of why you shouldn't naïvely cram your life with local optimizations (even for noble or altruistic reasons).] TL;DR: You need Slack to be an effective agent. Slack is fragile, and it is tempting to myopically sacrifice it, and myopic sacrifice makes future myopic sacrificing more likely. Learn not to do this and cultivate slack. Slack in Cells The smallest living mammal is the Etruscan shrew, weighing about 1.8g ("as much as a paperclip"), and ~4cm in length

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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