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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.If you"d like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

20:15

"Activation Oracles: Training and Evaluating LLMs as...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/20

TL;DR: We train LLMs to accept LLM neural activations as inputs and answer arbitrary questions about them in natural language. These Activation Oracles generalize far beyond their training distribution, for example uncovering misalignment or secret knowledge introduced via fine-tuning. Activation Oracles can be improved simply by scaling training data quantity and diversity. The below is a reproduction of our X thread on this paper and the Anthropic Alignment blog post. Thread New pap...

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5:55

"Scientific breakthroughs of the year" by technicalities

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/17

A couple of years ago, Gavin became frustrated with science journalism. No one was pulling together results across fields; the articles usually didn’t link to the original source; they didn't use probabilities (or even report the sample size); they were usually credulous about preliminary findings (“...which species was it tested on?”); and they essentially never gave any sense of the magnitude or the baselines (“how much better is this treatment than the previous best?”). Speculative resu...

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19:04

"A high integrity/epistemics political machine?" by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/17

I have goals that can only be reached via a powerful political machine. Probably a lot of other people around here share them. (Goals include “ensure no powerful dangerous AI get built”, “ensure governance of the US and world are broadly good / not decaying”, “have good civic discourse that plugs into said governance.”) I think it’d be good if there was a powerful rationalist political machine to try to make those things happen. Unfortunately the naive ways of doing that would destroy the ...

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52:20

"How I stopped being sure LLMs are just making up...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/16

How it started I used to think that anything that LLMs said about having something like subjective experience or what it felt like on the inside was necessarily just a confabulated story. And there were several good reasons for this. First, something that Peter Watts mentioned in an early blog post about LaMDa stuck with me, back when Blake Lemoine got convinced that LaMDa was conscious. Watts noted that LaMDa claimed not to have just emotions, but to have exactly the same emotions as hu...

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22:06

“My AGI safety research—2025 review, ’26 plans” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/15

Previous: 2024, 2022 “Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn't really matter.” –attributed to DL Moody[1] 1. Background & threat model The main threat model I’m working to address is the same as it's been since I was hobby-blogging about AGI safety in 2019. Basically, I think that: The “secret sauce” of human intelligence is a big uniform-ish learning algorithm centered around the cortex; This learning algorithm is different from an...

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17:32

“Weird Generalization & Inductive Backdoors” by Jorio...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/14

This is the abstract and introduction of our new paper. Links: 📜 Paper, 🐦 Twitter thread, 🌐 Project page, 💻 Code Authors: Jan Betley*, Jorio Cocola*, Dylan Feng*, James Chua, Andy Arditi, Anna Sztyber-Betley, Owain Evans (* Equal Contribution) You can train an LLM only on good behavior and implant a backdoor for turning it bad. How? Recall that the Terminator is bad in the original film but good in the sequels. Train an LLM to act well in the sequels. It'll be evil if told it's

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17:41

“Insights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/13

Credit: Nano Banana, with some text provided. You may be surprised to learn that ClaudePlaysPokemon is still running today, and that Claude still hasn't beaten Pokémon Red, more than half a year after Google proudly announced that Gemini 2.5 Pro beat Pokémon Blue. Indeed, since then, Google and OpenAI models have gone on to beat the longer and more complex Pokémon Crystal, yet Claude has made no real progress on Red since Claude 3.7 Sonnet![1] This is because ClaudePlaysPokemon is a purer t...

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4:54

“The funding conversation we left unfinished” by jenn

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/13

People working in the AI industry are making stupid amounts of money, and word on the street is that Anthropic is going to have some sort of liquidity event soon (for example possibly IPOing sometime next year). A lot of people working in AI are familiar with EA, and are intending to direct donations our way (if they haven't started already). People are starting to discuss what this might mean for their own personal donations and for the ecosystem, and this is encouraging to see. It also h...

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36:07

“The behavioral selection model for predicting AI...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/11

Highly capable AI systems might end up deciding the future. Understanding what will drive those decisions is therefore one of the most important questions we can ask. Many people have proposed different answers. Some predict that powerful AIs will learn to intrinsically pursue reward. Others respond by saying reward is not the optimization target, and instead reward “chisels” a combination of context-dependent cognitive patterns into the AI. Some argue that powerful AIs might end up with a...

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4:08

“Little Echo” by Zvi

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/09

I believe that we will win. An echo of an old ad for the 2014 US men's World Cup team. It did not win. I was in Berkeley for the 2025 Secular Solstice. We gather to sing and to reflect. The night's theme was the opposite: ‘I don’t think we’re going to make it.’ As in: Sufficiently advanced AI is coming. We don’t know exactly when, or what form it will take, but it is probably coming. When it does, we, humanity, probably won’t make it. It's a live question. Could easily go either way....

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63:58

“A Pragmatic Vision for Interpretability” by Neel Nanda

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/08

Executive Summary The Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team has made a strategic pivot over the past year, from ambitious reverse-engineering to a focus on pragmatic interpretability: Trying to directly solve problems on the critical path to AGI going well[[1]] Carefully choosing problems according to our comparative advantage Measuring progress with empirical feedback on proxy tasks We believe that, on the margin, more researchers who share our goals should take a pragmatic ...

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41:59

“AI in 2025: gestalt” by technicalities

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/08

This is the editorial for this year's "Shallow Review of AI Safety". (It got long enough to stand alone.) Epistemic status: subjective impressions plus one new graph plus 300 links. Huge thanks to Jaeho Lee, Jaime Sevilla, and Lexin Zhou for running lots of tests pro bono and so greatly improving the main analysis. tl;dr Informed people disagree about the prospects for LLM AGI – or even just what exactly was achieved this year. But they at least agree that we’re 2-20 years off...

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16:13

“Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity” by Eliezer...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/07

"How are you coping with the end of the world?" journalists sometimes ask me, and the true answer is something they have no hope of understanding and I have no hope of explaining in 30 seconds, so I usually answer something like, "By having a great distaste for drama, and remembering that it's not about me." The journalists don't understand that either, but at least I haven't wasted much time along the way. Actual LessWrong readers sometimes ask me how I deal emotionally with the end of th...

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8:49

“An Ambitious Vision for Interpretability” by leogao

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/06

The goal of ambitious mechanistic interpretability (AMI) is to fully understand how neural networks work. While some have pivoted towards more pragmatic approaches, I think the reports of AMI's death have been greatly exaggerated. The field of AMI has made plenty of progress towards finding increasingly simple and rigorously-faithful circuits, including our latest work on circuit sparsity. There are also many exciting inroads on the core problem waiting to be explored. The value of underst...

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32:39

“6 reasons why ‘alignment-is-hard’ discourse seems...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/04

Tl;dr AI alignment has a culture clash. On one side, the “technical-alignment-is-hard” / “rational agents” school-of-thought argues that we should expect future powerful AIs to be power-seeking ruthless consequentialists. On the other side, people observe that both humans and LLMs are obviously capable of behaving like, well, not that. The latter group accuses the former of head-in-the-clouds abstract theorizing gone off the rails, while the former accuses the latter of mindlessly assuming...

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9:45

“Three things that surprised me about technical...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/03

Open Philanthropy's Coefficient Giving's Technical AI Safety team is hiring grantmakers. I thought this would be a good moment to share some positive updates about the role that I’ve made since I joined the team a year ago. tl;dr: I think this role is more impactful and more enjoyable than I anticipated when I started, and I think more people should consider applying. It's not about the “marginal” grants Some people think that being a grantmaker at Coefficient means sorting through a b...

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15:37

“MIRI’s 2025 Fundraiser” by alexvermeer

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/02

MIRI is running its first fundraiser in six years, targeting $6M. The first $1.6M raised will be matched 1:1 via an SFF grant. Fundraiser ends at midnight on Dec 31, 2025. Support our efforts to improve the conversation about superintelligence and help the world chart a viable path forward. MIRI is a nonprofit with a goal of helping humanity make smart and sober decisions on the topic of smarter-than-human AI. Our main focus from 2000 to ~2022 was on technical research to try to make it ...

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12:03

“The Best Lack All Conviction: A Confusing Day in the...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/12/01

The AI Village is an ongoing experiment (currently running on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific time) in which frontier language models are given virtual desktop computers and asked to accomplish goals together. Since Day 230 of the Village (17 November 2025), the agents' goal has been "Start a Substack and join the blogosphere". The "start a Substack" subgoal was successfully completed: we have Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, Notes From an Electric Mind (by Claude Sonnet 4.5), Ana...

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25:57

“The Boring Part of Bell Labs” by Elizabeth

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/11/30

It took me a long time to realize that Bell Labs was cool. You see, my dad worked at Bell Labs, and he has not done a single cool thing in his life except create me and bring a telescope to my third grade class. Nothing he was involved with could ever be cool, especially after the standard set by his grandfather who is allegedly on a patent for the television. It turns out I was partially right. The Bell Labs everyone talks about is the research division at Murray Hill. They’re the ones t...

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4:18

[Linkpost] “The Missing Genre: Heroic Parenthood -...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/11/30

This is a link post. I stopped reading when I was 30. You can fill in all the stereotypes of a girl with a book glued to her face during every meal, every break, and 10 hours a day on holidays. That was me. And then it was not. For 9 years I’ve been trying to figure out why. I mean, I still read. Technically. But not with the feral devotion from Before. And I finally figured out why. See, every few years I would shift genres to fit my developmental stage: Kid → Adventure cause that's...

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