PODCAST

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

4:18

“Problems I’ve Tried to Legibilize” by Wei Dai

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

Looking back, it appears that much of my intellectual output could be described as legibilizing work, or trying to make certain problems in AI risk more legible to myself and others. I've organized the relevant posts and comments into the following list, which can also serve as a partial guide to problems that may need to be further legibilized, especially beyond LW/rationalists, to AI researchers, funders, company leaders, government policymakers, their advisors (including future AI advisors), and

en-gb

30:30

“Condensation” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/09

Condensation: a theory of concepts is a model of concept-formation by Sam Eisenstat. Its goals and methods resemble John Wentworth's natural abstractions/natural latents research.[1] Both theories seek to provide a clear picture of how to posit latent variables, such that once someone has understood the theory, they'll say "yep, I see now, that's how latent variables work!". The goal of this post is to popularize Sam's theory and to give my own perspective on it; however, it will not be a full

en-gb

9:21

“One Shot Singalonging is an attitude, not a skill or...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/09

Rationalist Winter Solstice is (in most cities) a singalong event. This worked extremely straightforwardly well in a living room in 2012, and in my family's Christmas Eve singalong that Rationalist Solstice was inspired by. It works way less well in an auditorium. When I seek out advice about making people more singalongable, there's a cluster of advice I get from folksinger people that... seems totally "correct", but, feels... insufficiently ambitious or something. The advice includes things

en-gb

5:59

“Insofar As I Think LLMs ‘Don’t Really Understand...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/09

When I put on my LLM skeptic hat, sometimes I think things like “LLMs don’t really understand what they’re saying”. What do I even mean by that? What's my mental model for what is and isn’t going on inside LLMs minds? First and foremost: the phenomenon precedes the model. That is, when interacting with LLMs, it sure feels like there's something systematically missing which one could reasonably call “understanding”. I’m going to articulate some mental models below, but even if I imagine all those

en-gb

20:43

“Omniscaling to MNIST” by cloud

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

In this post, I describe a mindset that is flawed, and yet helpful for choosing impactful technical AI safety research projects. The mindset is this: future AI might look very different than AI today, but good ideas are universal. If you want to develop a method that will scale up to powerful future AI systems, your method should also scale down to MNIST. In other words, good ideas omniscale: they work well across all model sizes, domains, and training regimes.The Modified National Institute of

en-gb

6:40

“Comparing Payor & Löb” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

Audio note: this article contains 49 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Löb's Theorem: If_vdash Box x to x_, then_vdash x_. Or, as one formula:_Box (Box x to x) to Box x_ Payor's Lemma: If_vdash Box (Box x to x) to x_, then_vdash x_. Or, as one formula:_Box

en-gb

5:42

“Against ‘You can just do things’” by zroe1

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

The barriers between us and what we want are often entirely imagined. It is true: you can learn how to paint, change careers, write a paper or run a marathon. These things are hard, but we shouldn’t pretend that they are impossible. You can just do them. But this mindset has a dangerous edge case: it can make you skip asking for permission precisely when you should ask. The anxiety you're overriding might be trying to tell you something important: that sometimes the fence is there for a reason

en-gb

8:14

“Unexpected Things that are People” by Ben Goldhaber

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

Cross-posted from https://bengoldhaber.substack.com/ It's widely known that Corporations are People. This is universally agreed to be a good thing; I list Target as my emergency contact and I hope it will one day be the best man at my wedding. But there are other, less well known non-human entities that have also been accorded the rank of person. Ships: Ships have long posed a tricky problem for states and courts. Similar to nomads, vagabonds, and college students on extended study abroad, they

en-gb

24:17

“Escalation and perception” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

Crosspost from my blog.Introduction Conflict pervades the world. Conflict can come from mere mistkes, but many conflicts are not mere mistakes. We don't understand conflict. We doubly don't understand conflict because some conflicts masquerade as mistakes, and we wish that they were mere mistakes, so we are happy to buy in to that masquerade. This is a mistake on our part, haha. We should study conflict until we understand it. This essay makes some attempt to sketch a few aspects of conflict—in

en-gb

8:46

“Entity Review: Pythia” by plex

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

[CW: Retrocausality, omnicide, philosophy] Three decades ago a strange philosopher was pouring ideas onto paper in a stimulant-fueled frenzy. He wrote that ‘nothing human makes it out of the near-future’ as techno-capital acceleration sheds its biological bootloader and instantiates itself as Pythia: an entity of self-fulfilling prophecy reaching back through time, driven by pure power seeking, executed with extreme intelligence, and empty of all values but the insatiable desire to maximize itself

en-gb

11:18

“Mourning a life without AI” by Nikola Jurkovic

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

Recently, I looked at the one pair of winter boots I own, and I thought “I will probably never buy winter boots again.” The world as we know it probably won’t last more than a decade, and I live in a pretty warm area. I. AGI is likely in the next decade It has basically become consensus within the AI research community that AI will surpass human capabilities sometime in the next few decades. Some, including myself, think this will likely happen this decade. II. The post-AGI world will be

en-gb

5:19

“AI is not inevitable.” by David Scott Krueger...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

AI companies are explicitly trying to build AIs that are smarter than humans, despite clear signs that it might lead to human extinction. It will be tragic and ironic if humanity's largest project ever is an all-out race to destroy ourselves. But can we really stop building more and more powerful AI? Or do we just need to try to “steer” it and hope for the best? Climate change and other societal failures have led more and more people to realize that the world is not the sensible, ordered place

en-gb

9:01

“Anthropic & Dario’s dream” by Simon Lermen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

Recently, Joe Carlsmith switched to work at Anthropic. He joins other members of the larger EA and Open Philanthropy ecosystem who are working at the AI lab, such as Holden Karnofsky. And of course many of the original founders were EA affiliated. In short, I think Anthropic is honest and is attempting to be an ethical AI lab, but they are deeply mistaken about the difficulty they are facing and are dangerously affecting the AI safety ecosystem. My guess is that Anthropic for the most part is

en-gb

17:51

“13 Arguments About a Transition to Neuralese AIs” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

Over the past year, I have talked to several people about whether they expect frontier AI companies to transition away from the current paradigm of transformer LLMs toward models that reason in neuralese within the next few years. This post summarizes 13 common arguments I’ve heard, six in favor and seven against a transition to neuralese AIs. The following table provides a summary:Arguments for a transition to neuraleseArguments against a transition to neuraleseA lot of information gets lost in

en-gb

21:07

“AI Safety’s Berkeley Bubble and the Allies We’re Not...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

Epistemic status: outside view critique based on public discourse, some HQ/location discussion, and a bit of lived experience. I know there are exceptions and counterexamples; I’m arguing about the center of gravity and revealed incentives of the Bay/EA/safety cluster, not claiming omniscience about every individual. There's a scene near the end of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that I have not been able to get out of my head. Voldemort has Harry fully under his power in the

en-gb

17:11

“A country of alien idiots in a datacenter: AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

Epistemic status: I'm pretty sure AI will alarm the public enough to change the alignment challenge substantially. I offer my mainline scenario as an intuition pump, but I expect it to be wrong in many ways, some important. Abstract arguments are in the Race Conditions and concluding sections. Nora has a friend in her phone. Her mom complains about her new AI "colleagues." Things have gone much as expected in late 2025; transformative AGI isn't here yet, and LLM agents have gone from useless to

en-gb

5:43

[Linkpost] “The Hawley-Blumenthal AI Risk Evaluation...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

This is a link post. Views expressed here are those of the author. The Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act is an exciting step toward preventing catastrophic and existential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. This legislation creates a domestic institutional foundation which can support effective governance and provide the situational awareness required to stay on top of the rapidly changing AI landscape. There are a handful of small issues with the bill, but overall, it looks

en-gb

4:26

“Two easy digital intentionality practices” by mingyuan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

A lot of people are daunted by the idea of doing a full digital declutter. Those people ask me all the time, “isn’t there something easier I can do that will still give me some of those sweet sweet benefits you were talking about?” The answer is: sort of. The longer answer is: I think that if you’re serious about wanting to change your digital habits, you will eventually need to do something higher-effort. That's because behavior change is hard, especially when you are fighting against not only

en-gb

8:37

“Toward Statistical Mechanics Of Interfaces Under...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

Audio note: this article contains 36 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Imagine using an ML-like training process to design two simple electronic components, in series. The parameters _theta^1_ control the function performed by the first component, and the parameters _theta^2_ control the function performed by the second component. The whole thing is

en-gb

1:05

“My new nonprofit Evitable is hiring.” by David Scott...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

https://evitable.com/ Our mission is to inform and organize the public to confront societal-scale risks of AI, and put an end to the reckless race to develop superintelligence. We're hiring for 3 roles: 1) Operations Associate or Head of Operations 2) Communications Associate or Head of Communications 3) Chief of Staff (CoS) We're also fielding expressions of interest from people who might lead movement building efforts (on a somewhat longer time line). I'd appreciate applications, leads for

en-gb

2,933 results

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Lead With AI

Tamara Nall

Linux in the Ham Shack

Black Sparrow Media

Data Engineering Podcast

Tobias Macey

Eye On A.I.

Craig S. Smith

Reflections

Livewire Labs