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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

7:47

"Annoyingly Principled People, and what befalls them"...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/15

Here are two beliefs that are sort of haunting me right now: Folk who try to push people to uphold principles (whether established ones or novel ones), are kinda an important bedrock of civilization.Also, those people are really annoying and often, like, a little bit crazy And these both feel fairly important. I’ve learned a lot from people who have some kind of hobbyhorse about how society is treating something as okay/fine, when it's not okay/fine. When they first started complaining a...

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4:42

"Morale" by J Bostock

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/14

One particularly pernicious condition is low morale. Morale is, roughly, "the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve." If your morale is low, you can't push through adversity. It's also very easy to accidentally drop your morale through standard rationalist life-optimization. It's easy to optimize for wellbeing and miss out on the factors which affect morale, especially if you're working on something important, like not having everyone die. One example is working at an ...

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11:26

"Anthropic repeatedly accidentally trained against...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/14

It turns out that Anthropic accidentally trained against the chain of thought of Claude Mythos Preview in around 8% of training episodes. This is at least the second independent incident in which Anthropic accidentally exposed their model's CoT to the oversight signal. In more powerful systems, this kind of failure would jeopardize safely navigating the intelligence explosion. It's crucial to build good processes to ensure development is executed according to plan, especially as human ove...

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3:39

"The policy surrounding Mythos marks an irreversible...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/14

This post assumes Anthropic isn't lying: Mythos is the current SOTAMythos is potent[1]Anthropic will not make it publicly available un-nerfed[2]Anthropic will have a select few companies use it as part of project glasswing[3] to improve cybersecurity or whatever Since the release of ChatGPT, at any given time, anyone on the planet with a few bucks could access the current most capable AI model, the SOTA.[4] Since Mythos, this has no longer been the case and I don't think it will ever hap...

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38:30

"Only Law Can Prevent Extinction" by Eliezer Yudkowsky

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/14

There's a quote I read as a kid that stuck with me my whole life: "Remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be fined. If you don’t pay the fine, you’ll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you’ll be shot." -- P. J. O'Rourke. At first I took away the libertarian lesson: Government is violence. It may, in some cases, be rightful violence. But it all rests on violence; never f...

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12:32

"Dario probably doesn’t believe in superintelligence"...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/13

Epistemic status: I think this is true but don't think this post is a very strong argument for the case, or particularly interesting to read. But I had to get 500 words out! I think the 2013 conversation is interesting reading as a piece of history, separate from the top-level question, and recommend reading that. I think many people have a relationship with Anthropic that is premised on a false belief: that Dario Amodei believes in superintelligence. What do I mean by "believes" in supe...

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10:09

"Daycare illnesses" by Nina Panickssery

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/13

Before I had a baby I was pretty agnostic about the idea of daycare. I could imagine various pros and cons but I didn’t have a strong overall opinion. Then I started mentioning the idea to various people. Every parent I spoke to brought up a consideration I hadn’t thought about before—the illnesses. A number of parents, including family members, told me they had sent their baby to daycare only for them to become constantly ill, sometimes severely, until they decided to take them out. This ...

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13:04

"If Mythos actually made Anthropic employees 4x more...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/12

Anthropic's system card for Mythos Preview says: It's unclear how we should interpret this. What do they mean by productivity uplift? To what extent is Anthropic's institutional view that the uplift is 4x? (Like, what do they mean by "We take this seriously and it is consistent with our own internal experience of the model.") One straightforward interpretation is: AI systems improve the productivity of Anthropic so much that Anthropic would be indifferent between the current situation...

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7:36

"Do not be surprised if LessWrong gets hacked" by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/09

Or, for that matter, anything else. This post is meant to be two things: a PSA about LessWrong's current security posture, from a LessWrong admin[1]an attempt to establish common knowledge of the security situation it looks like the world (and, by extension, you) will shortly be in Claude Mythos was announced yesterday. That announcement came with a blog post from Anthropic's Frontier Red Team, detailing the large number of zero-days (and other security vulnerabilities) discovered by Myt...

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21:04

"My picture of the present in AI" by ryan_greenblatt

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/09

In this post, I'll go through some of my best guesses for the current situation in AI as of the start of April 2026.You can think of this as a scenario forecast, but for the present (which is already uncertain!) rather than the future. I will generally state my best guess without argumentation and without explaining my level of confidence: some of these claims are highly speculative while others are better grounded, certainly some will be wrong. I tried to make it clear which claims are rel...

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10:23

"The effects of caffeine consumption do not decay...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/09

epistemic status: confident in the overall picture, substantial quantitative uncertainty about the relative potency of caffeine and paraxanthine tldr: The effects of caffeine consumption last longer than many assume. Paraxanthine is sort of like caffeine that behaves the way many mistakenly believe caffeine behaves. You've probably heard that caffeine exerts its psychostimulatory effects by blocking adenosine receptors. That matches my understanding, having dug into this. I'd also g...

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29:31

"AIs can now often do massive easy-to-verify SWE...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/06

I've recently updated towards substantially shorter AI timelines and much faster progress in some areas.[1] The largest updates I've made are (1) an almost 2x higher probability of full AI R&D automation by EOY 2028 (I'm now a bit below 30% [2] while I was previously expecting around 15%; my guesses are pretty reflectively unstable) and (2) I expect much stronger short-term performance on massive and pretty difficult but easy-and-cheap-to-verify software engineering (SWE) tasks that d...

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19:34

"dark ilan" by ozymandias

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/06

The second time Vellam uncovers the conspiracy underlying all of society, he approaches a Keeper. Some of the difference is convenience. Since Vellam reported that he’d found out about the first conspiracy, he's lived in the secret AI research laboratory at the Basement of the World, and Keepers are much easier to come by than when he was a quality control inspector for cheese. But Vellam is honest with himself. If he were making progress, he’d never tell the Keepers no matter how conven...

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12:01

"Dispatch from Anthropic v. Department of War...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/06

Dateline SAN FRANCISCO, Ca., 24 March 2026— A hearing was held on a motion for a preliminary injunction in the case of Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War et al. in Courtroom 12 on the 19th floor of the Phillip Burton Federal Building, the Hon. Judge Rita F. Lin presiding. About 35 spectators in the gallery (journalists and other members of the public, including the present writer) looked on as Michael Mongan of WilmerHale (lead counsel for the plaintiff) and Deputy Assistant Attorney Ge...

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32:04

"The Corner-Stone" by Benquo

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/06

Is the US a ruthless cognitive meritocracy that reliably promotes outlier talent? VB Knives defended that claim in a Twitter argument against Living Room Enjoyer that got my attention. [1] Knives argued that if you have a 150 IQ, you'll be a National Merit Scholar, which "at a minimum" gets you a free ride at a state flagship university, from which you can proceed to law school, med school, etc. Enjoyer shot back: I'm a Merit Scholar, where's my free ride? Knives asked Grok, Elon Musk's AI;...

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58:08

"The Practical Guide to Superbabies" by GeneSmith

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/04

It's Summer of 2025. I’m standing in a grass covered field on the longest day of the year. A friend of mine walks towards me, holding his newborn son. “Hey, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you were pretty instrumental in this kid existing. We read your blog post on polygenic embryo screening back in 2023 and decided to go through IVF to have him as a result.” He hesitates for a moment, then asks “Do you want to hold him?” I nod. As I cradle this child in my arms, I look down...

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25:05

"Anthropic’s Pause is the Most Expensive Alarm in...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/03

Imagine Apple halting iPhone production because studies linked smartphones to teen suicide rates. Imagine Pfizer proactively pulling Lipitor because of internal studies showing increased cardiac risk, and not because of looming settlements or FDA injunction, just for the health of patients. Or imagine if in 1952, Philip Morris halted expansion and stopped advertising when Wynder & Graham first showed heavy smokers had significantly elevated rates of lung cancer. It wouldn't happen. Co...

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1:49

"“You Have Not Been a Good User” (LessWrong’s second...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/02

tldr: The Fooming Shoggoths are releasing their second album "You Have Not Been a Good User"! Available on Spotify, Youtube Music and (hopefully within a few days) Apple Music. We are also releasing a remastered version of the first album, available similarly on Spotify and Youtube Music. There's an interactive widget here in the post. It took us quite a while but the Fooming Shoggoth's second album is finally complete! We had finished 9 out of the 13 songs on this album around a year ag...

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3:20

"Lesswrong Liberated" by Ronny Fernandez

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/01

A spectre is haunting the internet—the spectre of LLMism. The history of all hitherto existing forums is the history of clashing design tastes. For the first time in history, everyone has an equal ability in design! The means of design are no longer only held in the hands of those with "good design taste". Never before have forum users been so close to being able to design their own forums--perhaps the time is upon us now! It is for this reason that I have deposed the previous acting c...

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4:20

"Product Alignment is not Superintelligence Alignment...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/01

tl;dr: progress on making Claude friendly[1] is not the same as progress on making it safe to build godlike superintelligence. solving the former does not imply we get a good future.[2] please track the difference. The term Alignment was coined[3] to point to the technical problem of understanding how to build minds such that if they were to become strongly and generally superhuman, things would go well. It has been increasingly adopted by frontier AI labs and much of the rest of the AI ...

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585 results

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