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LessWrong posts by zvi

zvi

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi

technology philosophy

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53:06

“Childhood and Education #14: The War On Education”...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/10

The purported main purpose of school, and even of childhood, is educating children.Many people are actively opposed to this idea. Either they have other priorities that matter more, or sometimes they outright think that your child learning things is bad and you should feel bad for wanting that. Some even say it openly. They actively and openly want to stop your child from learning things, and want to put your child into settings where they will not learn things. And they say that this is good.

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44:24

“Yes, AI Continues To Make Rapid Progress, Including...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/09

That does not mean AI will successfully make it all the way to AGI and superintelligence, or that it will make it there soon or on any given time frame.It does mean that AI progress, while it could easily have been even faster, has still been historically lightning fast. It has exceeded almost all expectations from more than a few years ago. And it means we cannot disregard the possibility of High Weirdness and profound transformation happening within a few years. GPT-5 had a botched rollout and

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36:06

“OpenAI #14: OpenAI Descends Into Paranoia and Bad...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/08

I am a little late to the party on several key developments at OpenAI: OpenAI's Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane was central to the creation of the new $100 million PAC where they will partner with a16z to oppose any and all attempts of states to regulate AI in any way for any reason. Effectively as part of that effort, OpenAI sent a deeply bad faith letter to Governor Newsom opposing SB 53. OpenAI seemingly has embraced descending fully into paranoia around various nonprofit

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57:28

“AI #132 Part 2: Actively Making It Worse” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/05

It's rough out there. Have we tried engaging in less active sabotage? No? Carry on. Table of Contents Quiet Speculations. What will become the new differentiators? The Quest for Sane Regulations. Bostrom proposes improving on status quo a bit. The Quest For No Regulations. Cato Institute CEO says Cato Institute things. But This Time You’ve Gone Too Far. You’re drawing the line where? Really? Chip City. Sabotaging American solar and wind, the strategic value of chips. The Week in Audio

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67:12

“AI #132 Part 1: Improved AI Detection” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/04

One result of going on vacation was that I wasn’t able to spin events off into focused posts this week, so I’m going to fall back on splitting the weekly instead, plus some reserving a few subtopics for later posts, including AI craziness (the Tim Hua post on this is excellent), some new OpenAI largely policy-related shenanigans, and the continuing craziness of some people who should very much know better confidently saying that we are not going to hit AGI any time soon, plus some odds and ends

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31:52

“Startup Roundup #3” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/03

Startup Roundups (#1, #2) look like they’re settling in as an annual tradition.I’ve been catching up on queued roundups this week as the family was on vacation. I am back now but the weekly may be pushed to Friday as I dig out from the backlog. The Central Themes There is a common theme to the vignettes offered across the years. The central perspective has not much changed. I would summarize the perspective this way, first in brief and then with more words: Founding SV-style startups or

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42:59

“Traffic and Transit Roundup #1” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/02

Traffic and transit are finally getting a roundup all their own.I’ll start out with various victory laps on the awesomeness that is New York City Congestion pricing, which should hopefully now be a settled matter, then do a survey of everything else. New York City Congestion Pricing Redux We spent years fighting to get congestion pricing passed in New York City. Once it was in place, everyone saw that it worked. The city was a better place, almost everyone was better off, and also we got

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51:01

“Dating Roundup #7: Back to Basics” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/09/01

There's quite a lot in the queue since last time, so this is the first large chunk of it, which focuses on apps and otherwise finding an initial connection, and some things that directly impact that. Table of Contents You’re Single Because You Have No Friends To Date. You’re Single Because You Aren’t Willing To Be Dungeon Master. You’re Single Because You Didn’t Listen To My Friend's Podcast. You’re Single Because You Flunk The Eye Contact Test. You’re Single Because The Women Don’t Hit On

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0:39

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

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/29

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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62:22

“AI #131 Part 1: Gemini 2.5 Flash Image is Cool” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/28

Once again we’ve reached the point where the weekly update needs to be split in two. Thus, the alignment and policy coverage will happen tomorrow. Today covers the rest.The secret big announcement this week was Claude for Chrome. This is a huge deal. It will be rolling out slowly. When I have access or otherwise know more, so will you. The obvious big announcement was Gemini Flash 2.5 Image. Everyone agrees this is now the clear best image editor available. It is solid as an image generator, but

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10:20

“Are They Starting To Take Our Jobs?” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/27

Is generative AI making it harder for young people to find jobs?My answer is: Yes, definitely, in terms of for any given job that exists finding the job and getting hired. That's getting harder. AI is most definitely screwing up that process. Yes, probably, in terms of employment in automation-impacted sectors. It always seemed odd to think otherwise, and this week's new study has strong evidence here. Maybe, overall, in terms of the jobs available (excluding search and matching effects from

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32:27

“Reports Of AI Not Progressing Or Offering Mundane...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/26

In the wake of the confusions around GPT-5, this week had yet another round of claims that AI wasn’t progressing, or AI isn’t or won’t create much value, and so on. There were reports that one study in particular impacted Wall Street, and as you would expect it was not a great study. Situational awareness is not what you’d hope.I’ve gathered related coverage here, to get it out of the way before whatever Google is teasing (Gemini 3.0? Something else?) arrives to potentially hijack our attention.

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118:23

“AI #130: Talking Past The Sale” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/21

One potentially big event was that DeepSeek came out with v3.1. Initial response was very quiet, but this is DeepSeek and there are some strong scores especially on SWE and people may need time to process the release. So I’m postponing my coverage of this to give us time to learn more.Meta is restructuring its AI operations, including a hiring freeze. Some see this as some sign of an AI pullback. I don’t think that is right. Nor do I think what they are doing with their Ai companions is right,

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21:53

“AI Companion Conditions” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/20

The conditions are: Lol, we’re Meta. Or lol we’re xAI.This expands upon many previous discussions, including the AI Companion Piece. Lol We’re Meta I said that ‘Lol we’re Meta’ was their alignment plan. It turns out their alignment plan was substantially better or worse (depending on your point of view) than that, in that they also wrote down 200 pages of details of exactly how much lol there would be over at Meta. Every part of this was a decision. I recommend clicking through to

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115:58

“Monthly Roundup #33: August 2025” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/19

I got suckered into paying attention to multiple non-AI political stories this month: The shooting of the messenger, in violation of the most sacred principles, via firing the head of the USA's Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Online Safety Bill in the UK.As a reminder, feel no obligation whatsoever to engage with either of these. There are tons of other things worth paying attention to that are not that. Highly Effective Altruism I realize philanthropy has been handed quite a few

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23:49

“GPT-5: The Reverse DeepSeek Moment” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/18

Everyone agrees that the release of GPT-5 was botched. Everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT-4o and o3 to GPT-5 was not of similar size to the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4, that it was not the direct quantum leap we were hoping for, and that the release was overhyped quite a bit. GPT-5 still represented the release of at least three distinct models: GPT-5-Fast, GPT-5-Thinking and GPT-5-Pro, at least two and likely all three of which are SoTA (state of the art) within their class, along

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65:41

“GPT-5s Are Alive: Synthesis” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/13

What do I ultimately make of all the new versions of GPT-5?The practical offerings and how they interact continues to change by the day. I expect more to come. It will take a while for things to settle down. I’ll start with the central takeaways and how I select models right now, then go through the type and various questions in detail. Table of Contents Central Takeaways. Choose Your Fighter. Official Hype. Chart Crime. Model Crime. Future Plans For OpenAI's Compute. Rate

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62:53

“GPT-5s Are Alive: Outside Reactions, the Router and...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/12

A key problem with having and interpreting reactions to GPT-5 is that it is often unclear whether the reaction is to GPT-5, GPT-5-Router or GPT-5-Thinking. Another is that many of the things people are reacting to changed rapidly after release, such as rate limits, the effectiveness of the model selection router and alternative options, and the availability of GPT-4o. This complicates the tradition I have in new AI model reviews, which is to organize and present various representative and

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128:24

“AI #128: Four Hours Until Probably Not The...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/07

Brace for impact. We are presumably (checks watch) four hours from GPT-5.That's the time you need to catch up on all the other AI news. In another week, I might have done an entire post on Gemini 2.5 Deep Thinking, or Genie 3, or a few other things. This week? Quickly, there's no time. OpenAI has already released an open model. I’m aiming to cover that tomorrow. Table of Contents Also: Claude 4.1 is an incremental improvement, On Altman's Interview With Theo Von. Language Models Offer

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13:36

“Opus 4.1 Is An Incremental Improvement” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/08/06

Claude Opus 4 has been updated to Claude Opus 4.1.This is a correctly named incremental update, with the bigger news being ‘we plan to release substantially larger improvements to our models in the coming weeks.’ It is still worth noting if you code, as there are many indications this is a larger practical jump in performance than one might think. We also got a change to the Claude.ai system prompt that helps with sycophancy and a few other issues, such as coming out and Saying The Thing more

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