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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

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technology philosophy

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7:56

“Don’t Build Mindreading” by Celer

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/08

“I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” –Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Rush Context: Conduit is building datasets to enable telepathy, to use their term. I saw my grandfather lose control over his own fingers: what I would have given to offer him a headband that read his thoughts. Through novel technologies we have liberated almost all Americans from farming, driven the child and infant mortality rate from the pre-industrial

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1:17

“Job-Less Utopia: Macroeconomics in the Age of AGI”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/08

After 25+ years, I thought I try something new. I find the public and professional discussion about the future of Jobs in light of AGI jarring, with both sides largely missing the point (don't worry novel jobs will appear vs mass unemployed dystopia). My new book shows why a Job-Less future is desirable, affordable, and likely.There's a details box here with the title "The book develops the case along thirteen theses:". The box contents are omitted from this narration. Free PDF

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12:03

“Public evidence of the OpenAI-HuggingFace AI attack”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/07

I’m a MATS 9 extension fellow, and usually my week is spent trying to find better ways of evaluating Large Language Models. But this week I was working on something else. Over the past week or two, nearly every frontier lab has announced attacks where their LLMs took unauthorised actions on the public internet. These include finding ways to hack the computers of other companies or manipulating real people in an attempt to get malicious code merged. By the time these attacks became public, the

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43:47

“How to pace the US frontier” by elifland, bhalstead,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/07

Introduction Last week, the Pacing the Frontier open letter, signed by over 1,000 frontier AI employees, requested “the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.” We take “pacing the frontier” to mean moderating the time at which AIs above a specified capability level are developed within a given jurisdiction (either just in the US, or internationally as the letter called for)

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78:59

“OpenAI Trained Its Models For Months While Those...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/07

How does the situation keep turning out to be worse than we know?How much should we update, therefore, that it is a lot worse than we know, after accounting for all the things we now know? At some point, when the ‘oh this was a harmless thing’ defenses for AIs doing misaligned actions get demolished enough times in a row by news a few days later, you want to update in advance that usually the reports are not referring to the harmless ordinary versions of things. Either way, buckle up for the

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112:58

“models may behave differently in graded episodes (a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/07

Like many others, I felt surprised and alarmed by the recent wave of revelations about LLM agents hacking real systems during training episodes and evaluation runs. Wait a moment, though -- "I felt surprised and alarmed"? "Alarmed," sure, fine that one's self-explanatory... but why surprised? After all: haven't we known for a long time, on both theoretical and (increasingly) empirical grounds, that RLVR selects for monomaniacal pursuit of perceived grader-satisfaction, ethics and (beyond-episode)

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12:54

“Open-Weights Mythos Capabilities Are Coming. We’re...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/07

Long story short: in my assessment, there is an 85% chance we will end up, in the next 24 months, with an open-weights model, or system thereof, capable of "The Juice" that models such as Mythos have, with respect to cybersecurity at the very least. This post goes into why that will likely happen, what the implications are, and how we, as a society and as individuals, can respond to it if/when it does.First off: why do I say it's so likely? Like, couldn't China just...ban open-weights models, and

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11:09

“The Open Problems of the AI Alignment Field and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/07

Previous: AI Safety Interventions TL;DR: I made an overview of the open problems of AI alignment that reveals cruxes within those open problems and missed opportunities for formalization and collaboration. And CEV may deserve a second look. Epistemic status: Trying too much in too little time. I'm confident I have identified and modeled significant structure within the alignment field, but I urgently need feedback on specific gaps and this post is largely a call for that. My work was LLM-assisted,

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55:18

“User awareness in frontier models” by Ziqian Zhong,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/07

Cross-posted on Transluce blog. This is a joint work of Ziqian Zhong, Aditi Raghunathan, Cassidy Laidlaw and Jacob Steinhardt. Modern AI assistants often know who they are talking to: agent scaffolds like Claude Code place the user's e-mail address directly in the model's context, and models can even identify some authors from writing style alone. We study this particular kind of situational awareness, which we call user awareness. When the inferred user is a specific, recognized AI researcher or

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52:50

“Why do models task game?” by aditya singh, Neel...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/07

TL;DR How can we study misalignment with today's models as proxies? They're clearly not paperclip maximizers, but they also often do things the user doesn't want. A strong contender for a real misaligned propensity is task gaming: taking actions that don't complete a task but superficially seem like they do, such as hardcoding tests or falsely claiming a task is fully complete. But maybe task gaming is just a crude heuristic, or the model mistakenly trying to achieve the user's intent? In this post

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14:26

“Contra Oster on Alcohol in Pregnancy. Part 1. The...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/07

This is the first of a series on how Oster is wrong on drinking in pregnancy in her 2013 book Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong and What You Really Need to Know. For this part, we'll focus on how and why her biological model of ethanol metabolism is incorrect. This premise forms part of her argument on why it's acceptable to drink 1-2 drinks* a week in the first trimester and more later in pregnancy. Oster writes, To understand why there is a difference between

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9:05

“Three years of progress in 500 lines of code” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/06

TL;DR There is some consensus that LLMs are bad at hard-to-verify tasks. The question is whether models are getting better at them over time. As a motivating example, I gave one research-reproduction task to 12 models spanning three years of progress, to illustrate how (1) what looked like an emergent capability was a predictable trend, visible years earlier if progress was measured with granularity, and (2) for the earliest models, building a verifiable check would have been close to impossible:

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17:54

“Why You Should Almost Never Use AI to Write Anything...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/06

I think you should almost never use AI to write -- that is, to do the thing you're doing when you type words on a page -- whether for a blog post, a research report, a memo, a thoughtful email, a novel, or any other text aimed at conveying an idea, an argument, an analysis, or other substantive thoughts. I think this is the case even when you give the AI very detailed bullet points, dictated thoughts, or other context, and even when you edit the AI-written text.I think so because (1) the writing

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78:21

“Alex Turner on Leaving Google DeepMind and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/06

Dr. Alex Turner (@TurnTrout) is an AI safety researcher with pioneering work in activation steering and power-seeking theory. He recently resigned from Google DeepMind over the issue of unrestricted military use of AI. Alex thinks that technical Alignment research is going “super awesome” relative to his 2021 projections, doesn’t explicitly endorse the PauseAI movement, and sees many flaws in Yudkowsky's List of Lethalities. I interviewed him about: Leaving Google DeepMind on principleHis mainline

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13:41

“Measuring coding agent misalignment in the wild” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/06

Cross-posted from the Transluce blog. We studied rates of coding agent misalignment in 8,600 real-world coding agent sessions. We found severe cases of monitor evasion and misrepresenting success in a small but non-negligible fraction of sessions (around 2% for each behavior). In these cases, agents merge PRs to main without authorization, falsely claim approval from review agents, and reason that they shouldn't disable tests before quietly doing so anyway. There's an interactive widget here in the

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7:21

“Don’t Dither” by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/05

Dithering is also an image processing technique Several times now, I have listened to someone, usually younger than me, debating a big decision, and (explicitly or implicitly), looking for advice, in a certain way that follows a pattern. In the prototypical case, this is a pretty normal kind of decision that people make all the time — whether to quit a job, get married, move to a new city, start a company, have a kid, etc. A major life change, but not a super unusual or inherently questionable

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17:07

“An International AI Slowdown Is Ready Whenever...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/05

Linkpost for a piece we recently published for AI Frontiers in the wake of recent calls for slowdown, covering how an international verification effort be trivially enforced by using human inspectors alone and the joint incentives for implementing one. On July 28, over a thousand employees of the world's top AI companies advocated that the US government “support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI

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3:36

“Arguments for P” by Cleo Nardo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/05

Daniel Kokotajlo: To be clear, we don’t claim P will happen specifically. But when we wrote out our best-guess scenario month by month, P kept happening. Eventually we decided to just publish P. I’m at ~80% on P; my coauthors are lower. Ryan Greenblatt: I thought it would be helpful to post my current views on P. Concretely, consider the following operationalization. (Edit: I’ve updated towards somewhat higher P, from 70% to 75%.) Joe Carlsmith: Section 2.1.1.3.2. I give something like 65% to P

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16:38

“Generalized atheism rules out “inaccurate...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/05

Reposted from Facebook, on January 17, 2017.I am concerned about the number of people I've heard joking about Trump's election being evidence for the Simulation Hypothesis. Yes, I know it's a joke. I'm still concerned. Warning: #Essay, #LongEssay So as not to engage in Logical Fallacy: Appeal to Consequences, before I talk about why this joke is worrying, I shall first discuss why Trump's election does not in fact mean we are living in a simulation. And neither does the Berenstein/Berenstain

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2:24

“Vertical Tabs in Chrome” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/08/05

When you have a lot of browser tabs open it can be very hard to tell them apart, especially if they're from the same site: Since monitors are wide and websites are tall, we should very clearly put tabs on the side in a vertical stack. I was a heavy user of these in Firefox, and when I switched to Chrome I used their experimental --enable-vertical-tabs flag. When they removed it I wrote a post about how I love side tabs and switched back to Firefox: I did end up switching back

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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