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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

35:57

“Sonnet 4.5’s eval gaming seriously undermines...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/11/06

According to the Sonnet 4.5 system card, Sonnet 4.5 is much more likely than Sonnet 4 to mention in its chain-of-thought that it thinks it is being evaluated; this seems to meaningfully cause it to appear to behave better in alignment evaluations. So, Sonnet 4.5's behavioral improvements in these evaluations may partly be driven by growing tendency to notice and game evaluations rather than genuine alignment. This is an early example of a phenomenon that is going to get increasingly problemat...

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7:23

“Publishing academic papers on transformative AI is a...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/11/06

I am a professor of economics. Throughout my career, I was mostly working on economic growth theory, and this eventually brought me to the topic of transformative AI / AGI / superintelligence. Nowadays my work focuses mostly on the promises and threats of this emerging disruptive technology. Recently, jointly with Klaus Prettner, we’ve written a paper on “The Economics of p(doom): Scenarios of Existential Risk and Economic Growth in the Age of Transformative AI”. We have presented it at mu...

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15:03

“The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Fiction” by Raelifin

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/11/06

[Meta: This is Max Harms. I wrote a novel about China and AGI, which comes out today. This essay from my fiction newsletter has been slightly modified for LessWrong.] In the summer of 1983, Ronald Reagan sat down to watch the film War Games, starring Matthew Broderick as a teen hacker. In the movie, Broderick's character accidentally gains access to a military supercomputer with an AI that almost starts World War III. “The only winning move is not to play.” After watching the movie, Reaga...

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3:29

“Legible vs. Illegible AI Safety Problems” by Wei Dai

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/11/05

Some AI safety problems are legible (obvious or understandable) to company leaders and government policymakers, implying they are unlikely to deploy or allow deployment of an AI while those problems remain open (i.e., appear unsolved according to the information they have access to). But some problems are illegible (obscure or hard to understand, or in a common cognitive blind spot), meaning there is a high risk that leaders and policymakers will decide to deploy or allow deployment even if ...

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11:08

“Lack of Social Grace is a Lack of Skill” by Screwtape

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/11/04

1. I have claimed that one of the fundamental questions of rationality is “what am I about to do and what will happen next?” One of the domains I ask this question the most is in social situations. There are a great many skills in the world. If I had the time and resources to do so, I’d want to master all of them. Wilderness survival, automotive repair, the Japanese language, calculus, heart surgery, French cooking, sailing, underwater basket weaving, architecture, Mexican cooking,...

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1:07

[Linkpost] “I ate bear fat with honey and salt...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/11/04

This is a link post. Eliezer Yudkowsky did not exactly suggest that you should eat bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes. What he actually said was that an alien, looking from the outside at evolution, would predict that you would want to eat bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes. Still, I decided to buy a jar of bear fat online, and make a treat for the people at Inkhaven. It was surprisingly good. My post discusses how that happened, and a bit a...

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39:25

“What’s up with Anthropic predicting AGI by early...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/11/04

As far as I'm aware, Anthropic is the only AI company with official AGI timelines[1]: they expect AGI by early 2027. In their recommendations (from March 2025) to the OSTP for the AI action plan they say: As our CEO Dario Amodei writes in 'Machines of Loving Grace', we expect powerful AI systems will emerge in late 2026 or early 2027. Powerful AI systems will have the following properties: Intellectual capabilities matching or exceeding that of Nobel Prize winners across most discipline...

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3:00

[Linkpost] “Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/11/03

This is a link post. New Anthropic research (tweet, blog post, paper): We investigate whether large language models can introspect on their internal states. It is difficult to answer this question through conversation alone, as genuine introspection cannot be distinguished from confabulations. Here, we address this challenge by injecting representations of known concepts into a model's activations, and measuring the influence of these manipulations on the model's self-reported states. We f...

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4:17

[Linkpost] “You’re always stressed, your mind is...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/11/03

This is a link post. You have things you want to do, but there's just never time. Maybe you want to find someone to have kids with, or maybe you want to spend more or higher-quality time with the family you already have. Maybe it's a work project. Maybe you have a musical instrument or some sports equipment gathering dust in a closet, or there's something you loved doing when you were younger that you want to get back into. Whatever it is, you can’t find the time for it. And yet you somehow f...

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19:40

“LLM-generated text is not testimony” by TsviBT

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/11/03

Crosspost from my blog. Synopsis When we share words with each other, we don't only care about the words themselves. We care also—even primarily—about the mental elements of the human mind/agency that produced the words. What we want to engage with is those mental elements. As of 2025, LLM text does not have those elements behind it. Therefore LLM text categorically does not serve the role for communication that is served by real text. Therefore the norm should be that you don't share L...

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17:21

“Post title: Why I Transitioned: A Case Study” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/11/02

An Overture Famously, trans people tend not to have great introspective clarity into their own motivations for transition. Intuitively, they tend to be quite aware of what they do and don't like about inhabiting their chosen bodies and gender roles. But when it comes to explaining the origins and intensity of those preferences, they almost universally to come up short. I've even seen several smart, thoughtful trans people, such as Natalie Wynn, making statements to the effect that it's imp...

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21:27

“The Memetics of AI Successionism” by Jan_Kulveit

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/31

TL;DR: AI progress and the recognition of associated risks are painful to think about. This cognitive dissonance acts as fertile ground in the memetic landscape, a high-energy state that will be exploited by novel ideologies. We can anticipate cultural evolution will find viable successionist ideologies: memeplexes that resolve this tension by framing the replacement of humanity by AI not as a catastrophe, but as some combination of desirable, heroic, or inevitable outcome. This post mostly ...

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16:11

“How Well Does RL Scale?” by Toby_Ord

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/30

This is the latest in a series of essays on AI Scaling. You can find the others on my site. Summary: RL-training for LLMs scales surprisingly poorly. Most of its gains are from allowing LLMs to productively use longer chains of thought, allowing them to think longer about a problem. There is some improvement for a fixed length of answer, but not enough to drive AI progress. Given the scaling up of pre-training compute also stalled, we'll see less AI progress via compute scaling than you ...

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7:59

“An Opinionated Guide to Privacy Despite...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/30

I've created a highly specific and actionable privacy guide, sorted by importance and venturing several layers deep into the privacy iceberg. I start with the basics (password manager) but also cover the obscure (dodging the millions of Bluetooth tracking beacons which extend from stores to traffic lights; anti-stingray settings; flashing GrapheneOS on a Pixel). I feel strongly motivated by current events, but the guide also contains a large amount of timeless technical content. Here's a pre...

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23:54

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/30

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 ver...

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6:34

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/29

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...

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142:21

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

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 nu...

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16:47

“EU explained in 10 minutes” by Martin Sustrik

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/24

If you want to understand a country, you should pick a similar country that you are already familiar with, research the differences between the two and there you go, you are now an expert. But this approach doesn’t quite work for the European Union. You might start, for instance, by comparing it to the United States, assuming that EU member countries are roughly equivalent to U.S. states. But that analogy quickly breaks down. The deeper you dig, the more confused you become. You try with...

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3:38

“Cheap Labour Everywhere” by Morpheus

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/24

I recently visited my girlfriend's parents in India. Here is what that experience taught me: Yudkowsky has this facebook post where he makes some inferences about the economy after noticing two taxis stayed in the same place while he got his groceries. I had a few similar experiences while I was in India, though sadly I don't remember them in enough detail to illustrate them in as much detail as that post. Most of the thoughts relating to economics revolved around how labour in India is ex...

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2:35

[Linkpost] “Consider donating to AI safety champion...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/24

This is a link post. Written in my personal capacity. Thanks to many people for conversations and comments. Written in less than 24 hours; sorry for any sloppiness. It's an uncanny, weird coincidence that the two biggest legislative champions for AI safety in the entire country announced their bids for Congress just two days apart. But here we are. On Monday, I put out a long blog post making the case for donating to Alex Bores, author of the New York RAISE Act. And today I’m doing th...

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431 results

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