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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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4:04

“The Long (Self-)Correction” by Wei Dai

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/24

I propose the Long Self-Correction[1] as an alternative name/idea/concept to AI Pause and Long Reflection. Problem with AI Pause: Pause until when, and for what purpose? Presumably to make AI (that we'll build later) safer, but the deeper problem is that humans aren't safe, and can't safely serve as builders, overseers, or alignment targets for powerful AIs. Problem with Long Reflection: It seems to imply that the main problem with humans is that we just haven't had enough time to think, that

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25:50

“Does distilling Claude carry the persona with it?”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/24

TL;DR Both GLM 5.2 and Kimi K3 have been reported identifying as Claude in user conversations, suggesting distillation and/or training-data contamination. To test whether they simply use the name or have inherited a latent, selectable Claude persona, we ran identity swaps across a grid of seven Chinese and Western models and measured (using Personascope) if their safety and behavioural profiles change with the assigned name: Unprompted, Kimi K3 claimed to be Claude in 40% of direct queries[1]. When

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19:29

“LLMs are (still) mostly powered by imitative...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/24

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) is the hot new thing in LLM training. It's so hot, and people spend so much time talking about it, that they sometimes lose sight of the big picture. Stepping back, LLMs can do lots of very impressive things. How? Where did those capabilities come from? Fundamentally, they come from a combination of: (1) Imitative learning, including pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) See my earlier discussion: “LLM pretraining magically transmutes

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35:33

“Duane Arnold” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/24

“So maybe I should enlighten you on what happens in your absence. This selfish existence where this introvert turns extrovert and dons her social armour.” Some posh girl in drainpipes said that - 200 views on TikTok and me one of them. But she didn’t mean it like I mean it. I started getting expensive haircuts, started wearing jeans that hug my legs, started smoking cherry-flavoured vapes with beautiful gays and whinging to them about how everyone wears a mask but none so well as you, started

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2:17

“Pulling the Fire Alarm” by nem

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/24

Over three years ago, I first considered pulling my personal fire alarm. I think I'm now ready to start do it. What is my reasoning? In the last couple of months: 1) My software engineering job has gone 100% AI. Is this sustainable? Probably not. But I have literally been instructed not to write any more code. 2) A frontier model has been denied release (at least partially), due to dangerous capabilities. 3) I routinely turn to AI to help understand complicated topics/processes. In the last

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16:52

“Not Pinning Your OpenRouter Provider Might...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/24

Please share this with anyone doing AI research with 3rd party providers so that they can ensure their research won’t be corrupted. When you ask OpenRouter[1]to give you tokens from a given model, OpenRouter sends your request to a random available provider.OpenRouter providers have variable quality. Ensuring that your provider is high quality is really difficult.There is precedent for an AI safety paper accepted to NeurIPS having its core results entirely overturned by these issues.A reviewof

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57:57

“Pseudpocalypse” by dynomight

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/24

Here's a conjecture: If you put any significant amount of text on the internet under different names, those identities can be linked using only the text itself. This is possible (I conject) because of the statistical "fingerprint" you leave in everything you write. Imagine a website where you can paste in some brand-new text someone just wrote. In return, the website provides links to all the text that writer has ever published under any name. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. As far as I

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58:01

“Challenge: Hand coding weights for efficient...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/23

We hand coded weights for one layer MLPs that memorises labels for input token sequences of length two. The number of facts our hand-coded models can memorise with 90% accuracy[1]scales roughly linearly with the models' parameter count[2], just like trained models for the same architecture. However, our hand-coded models' scaling prefactor still falls short of trained models' by a factor of . A hybrid solution in which we handcode the MLP input weights and learn the MLP output weights, which

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36:58

“Lightcone Commons” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/23

TLDR: Lightcone Commons is a new funding platform for coordinating large-scale ambitious philanthropy. We recruit thinkers with strong track records to make grant recommendations to funders. Anyone giving away 100 thousand dollars+ per year is welcome to join. We are facilitating ~20 million dollars of grants in our first round, and hopefully more every 3 months after that. Evaluators are paid 2% of recommendations, and we charge a 3% platform fee. We handle all logistics and due diligence for

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6:35

“The OpenAI/Huggingface incident | Redwood Research...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/23

We talk about the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, where an OpenAI model — in the middle of a cyber evaluation — broke out of its sandbox and autonomously hacked Hugging Face.We discuss: What we actually know happened. How surprising the incident was. What the incident does (and doesn’t) tell us about misalignment risk. Why control measures didn’t catch or prevent this. What OpenAI should disclose, and what good misalignment-incident disclosure looks like in general Substack:

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7:47

“Can an LLM make a feature-length movie on its own?”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/23

How it did Betteridge's Law of Headlines says the answer is no[1], but I was able to make a feature-length adaptation of William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland. I have a YouTube channel where I mostly get LLMs to write albums and make them into music videos. This naturally made me curious whether an LLM could make a feature-length movie on its own. It doesn't seem like it would be harder to do than to disprove the Jacobian conjecture[2] and if the challenge is to just work for a

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1:33

“Mathematicians are Feeling the Doom” by alkjash

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/23

I think there's a critical opportunity for someone here. Mathematicians are feeling the doom (mostly in the "lose our jobs" sense). Academics are freaking out about the daily news that amateurs are asking GPT "prove career-defining theorem, make no mistakes" and it's just working. Senior researchers are leaving for frontier AI labs. Many are mentally spiralling or flailing about their life's work not mattering anymore. Last year, when I tried explaining IABIED to colleagues, I would be met with

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9:59

“Are we existentially threatened by the type of AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/23

OpenAI models recently broke through a series of security boundaries and into Hugging Face servers in order to cheat on a cyber eval. A lot of people thought it was scary because it was a clear example of AI overreaching to do something strongly unwanted[1]. Others thought it not so scary: the models were mostly operating myopically on a singular task and not harboring an ambitious long-term agenda, and so would not take especially subtle or subversive actions. We think both camps are right in

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15:18

“Will almost all future companies eventually be...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/23

Intended for a broad audience.[1] My belief is that keeping AI under human control would be an unprecedented global challenge, if it's even possible at all. Many other people's believe that AIs will naturally remain as tools under human control. Either they see this as inevitable—“how could it be otherwise?”—or they see it as not quite inevitable, but still an outcome that can easily happen via ordinary government regulations, civil society, and so on. Who's right? What's the right way to think

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47:34

“OpenAI Model Hacks Into HuggingFace During...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/22

This latest incident is a rather dramatic escalation in agentic AI cybersecurity breaches. It was severe enough to have been initially reported to authorities, before either HuggingFace or OpenAI understood what was happening. Sam Altman (CEO OpenAI): we had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models. we are sharing what we have learned so far. thanks to @huggingface for the partnership on this. Leo Gao (OpenAI): this is the least scifi the world will ever be. Jack Clark

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19:04

“Models don’t seem to be dishonest in the way humans...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/22

TLDR Models often behave dishonestly without acquiring a coherent deceptive disposition.We trained some mid-sized models on their own plausible but false reasoning.True and false training usually produced nearly identical downstream effects.Even statements contradicting latent knowledge transferred only weakly to unrelated dishonesty.General deception may require agency, persistent private information, and successful concealment over time. Introduction Current frontier models are mundanely

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3:35

“We should push for no-fault liability for actions...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/22

Before I start, I'll mention that I'm in contact with a world expert on legislation and regulation, who would be happy to help with this or similar work pro-bono. If you work in AI policy and believe this could help you, please reach out. OpenAI recently announced that one of their models successfully exploited multiple zero day vulnerabilities to gain secret information from Hugging Face. It has been pointed out that if a human undertook the same actions they could face multiple years in prison

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10:07

“Announcing AIXI Labs” by Cole Wyeth, Aram Ebtekar,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/22

We are starting AIXI Labs, an AI safety org focused on algorithmic information theory (AIT), continual reinforcement learning (RL), and in particular the eponymous AIXI. We aim to strengthen the technical case that developing artificial super intelligence (ASI) poses an X-risk while (in parallel) developing and prototyping theoretically-founded mitigations. (Already convinced? View open positions here.) Overview From the website: https://www.aixi.uk/ AIXI is the leading mathematical model of

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1:25

[Linkpost] ”[Paper] Stringological sequence...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/22

This is a link post. Abstract: In a previous paper, we began the study of sequence prediction algorithms adapted to stringological word complexity measures. One measure we considered was left-to-right (most-significant-digit-first) automaticity. Here, we show a statistically and computationally efficient algorithm adapted to the "dual" right-to-left (least-significant-digit-first) automaticity, which turns out to be substantially different for our purpose. We also demonstrate a prediction algorithm

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9:07

“I ran the standard AI litmus tests on my two...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/22

In July 2022 I was in a parking lot with a Portuguese colleague, trying to fix the cargo-metering system of a 12-ton tanker truck. During a break I read a headline on my phone: Google engineer claims experimental AI went sentient. An engineer (like me!), from Google, testing an AI (I do tests too!), claimed it had become sentient. I could not believe it. LaMDA was describing itself as a globe of light, claiming fear of being shut down, meditating during the long pauses between chats. If I were an

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