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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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31:57

“All the lab’s AI safety Plans: 2025 edition” by Algon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/28

Three out of three CEOs of top AI companies agree: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority." How do they plan to do this? Anthropic has a Responsible Scaling Policy, Google DeepMind has a Frontier Safety Framework, and OpenAI has a Preparedness Framework, all of which were updated in 2025. Overview of the policies All three policies have similar “bones”.[1] They: Take the same high-level approach: the company promises to test its AIs for dangerous capabilities

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8:52

“life lessons from trading” by thiccythot

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/28

crossposted from my substack 1) Traders get paid to guess where money will move. 2) There are many ways people win guessing games: Some people read new information quickly Some people send guesses quickly Some people process new information accurately Some people recognize patterns quickly Some people see patterns other's don’t see Some people read what other people are guessing accurately Some have networks that gossip about what the money will do. Some chase money where others cannot, will not,

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5:57

“Stability of natural latents in information...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

Audio note: this article contains 32 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. This post is a comment on Natural Latents: Latent Variables Stable Across Ontologies by John Wentworth and David Lorell. It assumes some familiarity with that work and does not attempt to explain it. Instead, I present an alternative proof that was developed as an exercise to aid my own understanding. While the original theorem

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6:35

“AIs should also refuse to work on capabilities...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

There's a strong argument that humans should stop trying to build more capable AI systems, or at least slow down progress. The risks are plausibly large but unclear, and we’d prefer not to die. But the roadmaps of the companies pursuing these systems envision increasingly agentic AI systems taking over the key tasks of researching and building superhuman AI systems, and humans will therefore have a decreasing ability to make many key decisions. In the near term, humanity could stop, but seem likely

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15:35

“FWIW: What I noticed at a (Goenka) Vipassana...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

tl;dr: I went to a typical 10-day Vipassana Center retreat. I had some hopes going in for what I might get out of it and those were mostly fulfilled. I had some worries that it might be creepy, icky, cringe, or in some other way awful, and for the most part it wasn’t. I’m glad I went, but on the other hand am in no great hurry to return. There are Vipassana Centers all over the world that teach a standardized meditation regimen designed by S.N. Goenka. Their retreats are offered on a

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23:55

“Cancer has a surprising amount of detail” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

There is a very famous essay titled ‘Reality has a surprising amount of detail’. The thesis of the article is that reality is filled, just filled, with an incomprehensible amount of materially important information, far more than most people would naively expect. Some of this detail is inherent in the physical structure of the universe, and the rest of it has been generated by centuries of passionate humans imbibing the subject with idiosyncratic convention. In either case, the detail is very, very

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6:18

“Credit goes to the presenter, not the inventor” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

VN: Hey M, you come up with a name for the architecture yet? M: No, we've been busy. VN: Buddy, it takes all of 5 seconds to come up with a name. M: Maybe for you! But for use mere mortals, it takes forever. E, I and the rest of the guys just can't settle on one. I don't see why you keep insisting the name's got to be short and sweet anyhow. Can't you just call it a report on computer architecture or something? VN: That's the worst name! Look, let me explain what I'm worried about, and perhaps

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142:22

“On Fleshling Safety: A Debate by Klurl and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

(23K words; best considered as nonfiction with a fictional-dialogue frame, not a proper short story.) Prologue: Klurl and Trapaucius were members of the machine race. And no ordinary citizens they, but Constructors: licensed, bonded, and insured; proven, experienced, and reputed. Together Klurl and Trapaucius had collaborated on such famed artifices as the Eternal Clock, Silicon Sphere, Wandering Flame, and Diamond Book; and as individuals, both had constructed wonders too numerous to number. At

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6:54

“Brightline is Actually Pretty Dangerous” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/26

Per the Atlantic's A 'Death Train' is Haunting South Florida: According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people—none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves. By comparison, the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter line in the country, hit and

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8:43

“Seven-ish Words from My Thought-Language” by Lorxus

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/26

(With thanks to @TsviBT, @Lucie Philippon, and @johnswentworth for encouragement and feedback, among many.) Seven entries from a dictionary that will never exist, even though it should. The words in [brackets] show up with some frequency in my thoughts, and I struggle with English's semantic poverty. Some of them show up in other languages, like Korean or Lojban. Others among them, people I’ve spoken to share in wishing were wider-used words. [untranslatable 1: word-clogged/interference-silent]

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18:15

“Origins and dangers of future AI capability denial”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/25

In rationalist spheres, there's a fairly clear consensus that whatever AI's ultimate impact will be, it is at its core a capable technology that will have very large effects on the world. In the "general public" sphere, things are very different. There's a less clear but real consensus that AI's ultimate impact will be negative, and not much agreement on the capability of AI as a technology. I think it's very plausible that this could go the opposite way of rationalists, into a disbelief in the

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10:56

“Beliefs about formal methods and AI safety” by Quinn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/25

I appreciate Theodore Ehrenborg's comments. As a wee lad, I heard about mathematical certainty of computer programs. Let's go over what I currently believe and don’t believe. First: what is formal verification Sometimes you get pwned because of the spec-implementation gap. The computer did not do what it should’ve done. Other times, you get pwned by the world-spec gap. The computer wasn’t wrong, your “shoulds” were. Expanding the domain of compiletime knowledge A compiler tells you the problem

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5:28

“Reminder: Morality is unsolved” by Jesper L.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/25

Here is a game you can play with yourself, or others: a) You have to decide on a moral framework that can be explained in detail, to anyone. b) It will be implemented worldwide tomorrow. c) Tomorrow, every single person on Earth, including you and everyone you know, will also have their lives randomly swapped with someone else. This means that you are operating under the veil of ignorance. You should make sure that the morality you decide on is beneficial whoever you are, once it takes effect

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1:10

[Linkpost] “AI Timelines and Points of no return” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/25

This is a link post. In this essay, I introduce two Points of No Return (PNR): The Hard PNR. The moment where we have AI systems powerful and intelligent enough that they can prevent humanity from turning them off. The Soft PNR. The moment where we have AI systems that we will not want to turn off. For instance, because they are too intertwined with the economy, military systems, geopolitics, or romantic relationships. I believe the Soft PNR is underrated (especially in rationalist communities). I

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5:24

“Musings on Reported Cost of Compute (Oct 2025)” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/25

There are many ways in which costs of compute get reported. A 1 GW datacenter site costs $10-15bn in the infrastructure (buildings, cooling, power), plus $30-35bn in compute hardware (servers, networking, labor), assuming Nvidia GPUs. Useful life of the infrastructure is about 10-15 years, and with debt financing a developer only needs to ensure it's paid off over those 10-15 years, which comes out at $1-2bn per year. For the compute hardware, the useful life is taken as about 5 years, which gives

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1:10

[Linkpost] “LW Reacts pack for Discord/Slack/etc” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/25

This is a link post. Ever wanted to say Scout Mindset to someone on a chat platform, but didn't want to have to type 13 characters? Or wanted your server to have magically better epistemics because of a few images? The LW Reactions Pack is here to help! With 63 images (or 37 for the cut down budget set of good ones if you're limited), we guarantee you will have more reaction options than you started with. Full Pack (63) Important only (37) --- First published: October 24th, 2025

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6:19

“Regardless of X, you can still just sign...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/24

TL;DR: you can still just sign this statement if you agree with it. It still matters, and you can clarify your position in a statement of support (600 characters) next to your name, and you can clarify your actual full position on LW and/or elsewhere. Regardless of X, you can still just sign. (for various values of X...) X= whether you agree with me that safety researchers have a duty to take a public stance. If you agree with the statement and you are working at a lab where some of your coworkers

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5:48

“Plan 1 and Plan 2” by Towards_Keeperhood

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/24

Max Tegmark recently published a post "Which side of the AI safety community are you in?", where he carves the AI safety community into 2 camps: Camp A) "Race to superintelligence safely”: People in this group typically argue that "superintelligence is inevitable because of X”, and it's therefore better that their in-group (their company or country) build it first. X is typically some combination of “Capitalism”, “Molloch”, “lack of regulation” and “China”. Camp B) “Don’t race to

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21:48

“How an AI company CEO could quietly take over the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/24

Cross-posted from the AI Futures Project Substack. This post outlines a concrete scenario for how takeover by an AI company CEO might go, which I developed during MATS with the AI Futures Project. It represents one plausible story among a few that seem roughly equally likely to me. I’m interested in feedback and discussion. If the future is to hinge on AI, it stands to reason that AI company CEOs are in a good position to usurp power.[1] This didn’t quite happen in our AI 2027 scenarios. In one,

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14:15

“The main way I’ve seen people turn ideologically...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/24

This linkpost is in part a response to @Raemon's comment about why the procedure Raemon did doesn't work in practice to deal with the selection effects I talked about in my last post. So in the last post, I was talking about a selection effect where believers of an argument can come to believe that their idea is true and that their critics are crazy wrong/trolling/dumb, no matter what argument is used. And the believers are half-right, in that their random error swamps any truth signal/evidence for

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