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LessWrong posts by zvi

zvi

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi

technology philosophy

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17:17

“Trade Escalation, Supply Chain Vulnerabilities and...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/14

What is going on with, and what should we do about, the Chinese declaring extraterritorial exports controls on rare earth metals, which threaten to go way beyond semiconductors and also beyond rare earths into things like lithium and also antitrust investigations? China also took other actions well beyond only rare Earths, including going after Qualcomm, lithium and everything else that seemed like it might hurt, as if they are confident that a cornered Trump will fold and they believe they have

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45:53

“OpenAI #15: More on OpenAI’s Paranoid Lawfare...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/13

A little over a month ago, I documented how OpenAI had descended into paranoia and bad faith lobbying surrounding California's SB 53. This included sending a deeply bad faith letter to Governor Newsom, which sadly is par for the course at this point. It also included lawfare attacks against bill advocates, including Nathan Calvin and others, using Elon Musk's unrelated lawsuits and vendetta against OpenAI as a pretext, accusing them of being in cahoots with Elon Musk. Previous reporting of this

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19:49

“2025 State of AI Report and Predictions” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/10

The 2025 State of AI Report is out, with lots of fun slides and a full video presentation. They’ve been consistently solid, providing a kind of outside general view.I’m skipping over stuff my regular readers already know that doesn’t bear repeating. Qwen The Fine Tune King For Now Nathan Benaich: Once a “Llama rip-off,” @Alibaba_Qwen now powers 40% of all new fine-tunes on @huggingface. China's open-weights ecosystem has overtaken Meta's, with Llama riding off into the

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111:02

“AI #137: An OpenAI App For That” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/09

OpenAI is making deals and shipping products. They locked in their $500 billion valuation and then got 10% of AMD in exchange for buying a ton of chips. They gave us the ability to ‘chat with apps’ inside of ChatGPT. They walked back their insane Sora copyright and account deletion policies and are buying $50 million in marketing. They’ve really got a lot going on right now. Of course, everyone else also has a lot going on right now. It's AI. I spent the last weekend at a great AI conference at

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62:12

“NEPA, Permitting and Energy Roundup #2” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/08

It's been about a year since the last one of these. Given the long cycle, I have done my best to check for changes but things may have changed on any given topic by the time you read this. The NEPA Problem NEPA is a constant thorn in the side of anyone attempting to do anything. A certain kind of person responds with: “Good.” That kind of person does not want humans to do physical things in the world. They like the world as it is, or as it used to be. They do not want humans messing

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49:37

“Medical Roundup #5” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/06

Some amazing things are going on, not all of which involve mRNA, although please please those of you with the ability to do so, do your part to ensure that stays funded, either via investment or grants. As for mRNA, please do what you can to help save it, so we can keep getting more headlines like ‘a new cancer vaccine just wiped out tumors’ even if it is sufficiently early that the sentence this time inevitably concludes ‘IN MICE.’ Heart Disease Wait, what, you’re saying we might soon ‘mostly

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67:11

“Sora and The Big Bright Screen Slop Machine” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/03

OpenAI gave us two very different Sora releases. Here is the official announcement.The part where they gave us a new and improved video generator? Great, love it. The part where they gave us a new social network dedicated purely to short form AI videos? Not great, Bob. Don’t be evil. OpenAI is claiming they are making their social network with an endless scroll of 10-second AI videos the Actively Good, pro-human version of The Big Bright Screen Slop Machine, that helps you achieve your goals

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87:09

“AI #136: A Song and Dance” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/02

The big headline this week was the song, which was the release of Claude Sonnet 4.5. I covered this in two parts, first the System Card and Alignment, and then a second post on capabilities. It is a very good model, likely the current best model for most coding tasks, most agentic and computer use tasks, and quick or back-and-forth chat conversations. GPT-5 still has a role to play as well. There was also the dance, also known as Sora, both the new and improved 10-second AI video generator Sora

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49:19

“Claude Sonnet 4.5 Is A Very Good Model” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/10/01

A few weeks ago, Anthropic announced Claude Opus 4.1 and promised larger announcements within a few weeks. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the larger announcement. Yesterday I covered the model card and related alignment concerns. Today's post covers the capabilities side. We don’t currently have a new Opus, but Mike Krieger confirmed one is being worked on for release later this year. For Opus 4.5, my request is to give us a second version that gets minimal or no RL, isn’t great at coding, doesn’t use

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61:17

“Claude Sonnet 4.5: System Card and Alignment” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/30

Claude Sonnet 4.5 was released yesterday. Anthropic credibly describes it as the best coding, agentic and computer use model in the world. At least while I learn more, I am defaulting to it as my new primary model for queries short of GPT-5-Pro level. I’ll cover the system card and alignment concerns first, then cover capabilities and reactions tomorrow once everyone has had another day to play with the new model. It was great to recently see the collaboration between OpenAI and Anthropic where

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41:53

“On Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast With Richard Sutton” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/29

This seems like a good opportunity to do some of my classic detailed podcast coverage. The conventions are: This is not complete, points I did not find of note are skipped. The main part of each point is descriptive of what is said, by default paraphrased. For direct quotes I will use quote marks, by default this is Sutton. Nested statements are my own commentary. Timestamps are approximate and from his hosted copy, not the YouTube version, in this case I didn’t bother because the section

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29:09

“Economics Roundup #6” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/26

I obviously cover many economical things in the ordinary course of business, but I try to reserve the sufficiently out of place or in the weeds stuff that is not time sensitive for updates like this one.Trade is Bad Good We love trade now, so maybe it’ll all turn out great? John Burn-Murdoch: Negative partisanship is a helluva drug: Up until a few months ago, liberal and conservative Americans held pretty much the same views on free trade. Now, not so much… Yet another

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86:25

“AI #135: OpenAI Shows Us The Money” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/25

OpenAI is here this week to show us the money, as in a $100 billion investment from Nvidia and operationalization of a $400 billion buildout for Stargate. They are not kidding around when it comes to scale. They’re going to need it, as they are announcing soon a slate of products that takes inference costs to the next level. After a full review and two reaction posts, I’ve now completed my primary coverage of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. The book is now a NYT bestseller, #7 in combined

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17:24

“OpenAI Shows Us The Money” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/24

They also show us the chips, and the data centers. It is quite a large amount of money, and chips, and some very large data centers. Nvidia Invests Up To $100 Billion In OpenAI Nvidia to invest ‘as much as’ $100 billion (in cash) into OpenAI to support new data centers, with $10 billion in the first stage, on the heels of investing $5 billion into Intel. Ian King and Shirin Ghaffary (Bloomberg): According to Huang, the project will encompass as many as 5 million of Nvidia's

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36:38

“More Reactions to If Anyone Builds It, Everyone...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/23

Previously I shared various reactions to If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, along with my own highly positive review. Reactions continued to pour in, including several impactful ones. There's more. Any further reactions will have a higher bar, and be included in weekly posts unless one is very high quality and raises important new arguments. Sales Look Good IABIED gets to #8 in Apple Books nonfiction, #2 in UK. It has 4.8 on Amazon and 4.3 on Goodreads. The New York Times bestseller list

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34:51

“H1-B And The $100k Fee” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/22

The Trump Administration is attempting to put a $100k fee on future H1-B applications, including those that are exempt from the lottery and cap, unless of course they choose to waive it for you. I say attempting because Trump's legal ability to do this appears dubious. This post mostly covers the question of whether this is a reasonable policy poorly implemented, or a terrible policy poorly implemented. Details offered have been contradictory, with many very confused about what is happening,

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14:47

“AI Craziness Notes” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/16

As in, cases of AI driving people crazy, or reinforcing their craziness. Alas, I expect this to become an ongoing series worthy of its own posts. Say It Isn’t So In case an LLM assisted in and validated your scientific breakthrough, Egg Syntax is here with the bad news that your discovery probably isn’t real. At minimum, first have another LLM critique the breakthrough without giving away that it is your idea, and keep in mind that they often glaze anyway, so the idea still almost certainly

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0:39

“AI #131 Part 2: Various Misaligned Things” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/12

It doesn’t look good, on many fronts, especially taking a stake in Intel.We continue. Table of Contents America Extorts 10% of Intel. Nice company you got there. Who's next? The Quest For No Regulations Whatsoever. a16z is at it again, Brockman joins. The Quest for Sane Regulations. Dean Ball surveys the state legislative landscape. Chip City. Nvidia beats earnings, Huawei plans to triple chip production. Once Again The Counterargument On Chip City. Sriram Krishnan makes a case.

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55:49

“Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/12

Where ‘it’ is superintelligence, an AI smarter and more capable than humans. And where ‘everyone dies’ means that everyone dies. No, seriously. They’re not kidding. They mean this very literally. To be precise, they mean that ‘If anyone builds [superintelligence] [under anything like present conditions using anything close to current techniques] then everyone dies.’ My position on this is to add a ‘probably’ before ‘dies.’ Otherwise, I agree. This book gives us the best longform explanation of

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89:17

“AI #133: America Could Use More Energy” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/11

Even in quiet weeks like this one, there are noticeable incremental upgrades. The cost of the best video generation tool, Veo 3, went down by half. ChatGPT now offers conversation branching. Claude can directly edit files. Yet it is a good time to ask about the missing results. Where are all the AI agents? If AI coding is so good why aren’t we seeing a surge in GitHub repositories or iPhone apps?A lot of the focus since the rollout of GPT-5 remains on the perception and policy fronts, especially

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LessWrong posts by zvi

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