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LessWrong posts by zvi

zvi

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi

technology philosophy

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45:28

“AI #149: 3” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/01/01

The Rationalist Project was our last best hope that we might not try to build it.It failed. But in the year of the Coding Agent, it became something greater: our last, best hope – for everyone not dying. This is what 2026 looks like. The place is Lighthaven. Table of Contents Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. 2026 is an age of wonders. Claude Code. The age of humans writing code may be coming to an end. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Your dog's dead, Jimmy.

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32:48

“Dating Roundup #8: Tactics” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/29

Here's to everyone having a great 2026 in all ways, so I figured what better way to end the year than with a little practical advice. Like everything else, dating is a skill. Practice makes perfect. It helps to combine it with outside analysis, to help you on your quest to Just Do Things.You’re Single Because You Lack Reps A common theme in these roundups is that the best thing you can do as a young man, to get better at dating and set yourself up for success, is to get out there and engage

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33:38

“Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids Be Kids”...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/26

The Revolution of Rising Requirements has many elements. The most onerous are the supervisory requirements on children. They have become, as Kelsey Piper recently documented, completely, utterly insane, to the point where:A third of people, both parents and non-parents, responded in a survey that it is not appropriate to leave a 13 year old at home for an hour or two, as opposed to when we used to be 11 year olds babysitting for other neighborhood kids. A third of people said in that same

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76:41

“AI #148: Christmas Break” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/25

Claude Opus 4.5 did so well on the METR task length graph they’re going to need longer tasks, and we still haven’t scored Gemini 3 Pro or GPT-5.2-Codex. Oh, also there's a GPT-5.2-Codex.At week's end we did finally get at least a little of a Christmas break. It was nice. Also nice was that New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the RAISE Act, giving New York its own version of SB 53. The final version was not what we were hoping it would be, but it still is helpful on the margin. Various people

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23:15

“Zvi’s 2025 In Movies” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/24

Now that I am tracking all the movies I watch via Letterboxd, it seems worthwhile to go over the results at the end of the year, and look for lessons, patterns and highlights.Last year: Zvi's 2024 In Movies. The Ratings Scale You can find all my ratings and reviews on Letterboxd. I do revise from time to time, either on rewatch or changing my mind. I encourage you to follow me there. Letterboxd ratings go from 0.5-5. The scale is trying to measure several things at once. 5: Masterpiece

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12:08

“Keeping Up Against the Joneses: Balsa’s 2025...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/23

Several years ago Zvi Mowshowitz founded Balsa Research, a tiny nonprofit research organization currently focused on quantifying the impact of the Jones Act on the American economy, and working towards viable reform proposals.While changing century-old policy is not going to be easy, we continue to see many places where there is neglected groundwork that we’re well positioned to do, and we are improving at doing it with another year of practice under our belts. We’re looking to raise $200,000 to

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12:12

“Keeping Up Against the Joneses: Balsa’s 2025...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/22

Balsa Research is a tiny nonprofit research organization currently focused on quantifying the impact of the Jones Act on the American economy, and working towards viable reform proposals. While changing century-old policy is not going to be easy, we continue to see many places where there is neglected groundwork that we’re well positioned to do, and we are improving at doing it with another year of practice under our belts. We’re looking to raise $200,000 to support our work this giving season,

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37:28

“The Revolution of Rising Expectations” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/22

Internet arguments like the $140,000 Question incident keep happening. The two sides say: Life sucks, you can’t get ahead, you can’t have a family or own a house. What are you talking about, median wages are up, unemployment is low and so on. The economic data is correct. Real wages are indeed up. Costs for food and clothing are way down while quality is up, housing is more expensive than it should be but is not much more expensive relative to incomes. We really do consume vastly more and

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113:50

“AI #147: Flash Forward” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/18

This week I covered GPT 5.2, which I concluded is a frontier model only for the frontier. OpenAI also gave us Image 1.5 and a new image generation mode inside ChatGPT. Image 1.5 looks comparable to Nana Banana Pro, it's hard to know which is better. They also inked a deal for Disney's characters, then sued Google for copyright infringement on the basis of Google doing all the copyright infringement. As a probable coda to the year's model releases we also got Gemini 3 Flash, which I cover in this

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37:38

“The $140K Question: Cost Changes Over Time” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/17

In The $140,000 Question, I went over recent viral claims about poverty in America.The calculations behind the claims were invalid, the central claim (that the ‘true poverty line’ was $140k) was absurd, but the terrible vibes are real. People increasingly feel that financial life is getting harder and that success is out of reach. ‘Real income’ is rising, but costs are rising even more. Before we get to my central explanations for that – the Revolution of Rising Expectations and the Revolution

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29:48

“The $140,000 Question” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/16

There was a no good, quite bad article by Michael Green that went viral. The condensed version was entitled ‘The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 Is the New Poverty,’ and a follow-up here. His actual claim in that post, which was what caught fire, was that the poverty line should be $140,000, and even that this number is him ‘being conservative.’ Obviously that is not remotely true, given that: America is the richest large country in history by a wide margin. $140,000 is at or above median

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41:01

“Monthly Roundup #37: December 2026” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/12

I’m doing the Monthly Roundup early this month so that next week can be GPT-5.2 and affordability of life week, assuming we are not overtaken by other events.Ban Gain of Function Research The risk-reward profile of creating highly dangerous new viruses, supposedly in order to study them, is abysmal even when things are handled properly. Also, the actual practice of it is completely utterly insane. This below is the kind of thing that could very easily cause a global pandemic vastly worse

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85:25

“AI #146: Chipping In” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/11

It was touch and go, I’m worried GPT-5.2 is going to drop any minute now, but DeepSeek v3.2 was covered on Friday and after that we managed to get through the week without a major model release. Well, okay, also Gemini 3 DeepThink, but we all pretty much know what that offers us.We did have a major chip release, in that the Trump administration unwisely chose to sell H200 chips directly to China. This would, if allowed at scale, allow China to make up a substantial portion of its compute deficit,

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48:20

“Childhood and Education #15: Got To Get Out” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/10

The focus this time around is on the non-academic aspects of primary and secondary school, especially various questions around bullying and discipline, plus an extended rant about someone being wrong on the internet while attacking homeschooling, and the latest on phones.Bullying If your child is being bullied for real, and it's getting quite bad, is this an opportunity to learn to stand up for yourself, become tough and other stuff like that? Mostly no. Actually fighting back effectively

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24:43

“Selling H200s to China Is Unwise and Unpopular” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/09

AI is the most important thing about the future. It is vital to national security. It will be central to economic, military and strategic supremacy.This is true regardless of what other dangers and opportunities AI might present. The good news is that America has many key advantages in AI. America's greatest advantage in AI is our vastly superior access to compute. We are in danger of selling a large portion of that advantage for 30 pieces of silver. This is on track to be done against the

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4:09

“Little Echo” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/08

I believe that we will win. An echo of an old ad for the 2014 US men's World Cup team. It did not win. I was in Berkeley for the 2025 Secular Solstice. We gather to sing and to reflect. The night's theme was the opposite: ‘I don’t think we’re going to make it.’ As in: Sufficiently advanced AI is coming. We don’t know exactly when, or what form it will take, but it is probably coming. When it does, we, humanity, probably won’t make it. It's a live question. Could easily go either way. We are not

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19:30

“DeepSeek v3.2 Is Okay And Cheap But Slow” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/05

DeepSeek v3.2 is DeepSeek's latest open model release with strong bencharks. Its paper contains some technical innovations that drive down cost.It's a good model by the standards of open models, and very good if you care a lot about price and openness, and if you care less about speed or whether the model is Chinese. It is strongest in mathematics. What it does not appear to be is frontier. It is definitely not having a moment. In practice all signs are that it underperforms its benchmarks.

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114:09

“AI #145: You’ve Got Soul” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/04

The cycle of language model releases is, one at least hopes, now complete.OpenAI gave us GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.1-Codex-Max. xAI gave us Grok 4.1. Google DeepMind gave us Gemini 3 Pro and Nana Banana Pro. Anthropic gave us Claude Opus 4.5. It is the best model, sir. Use it whenever you can. One way Opus 4.5 is unique is that it as what it refers to as a ‘soul document.’ Where OpenAI tries to get GPT-5.1 to adhere to its model spec that lays out specific behaviors, Anthropic instead explains to

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39:06

“On Dwarkesh Patel’s Second Interview With Ilya...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/03

Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was very clearly one of those. So here we go.Double click to interact with video As usual for podcast posts, the baseline bullet points describe key points made, and then the nested statements are my commentary. If I am quoting directly I use quote marks, otherwise assume paraphrases. What are the main takeaways? Ilya thinks training in its current form will peter out, that we are

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14:17

“Reward Mismatches in RL Cause Emergent Misalignment”...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2025/12/02

Learning to do misaligned-coded things anywhere teaches an AI (or a human) to do misaligned-coded things everywhere. So be sure you never, ever teach any mind to do what it sees, in context, as misaligned-coded things.If the optimal solution (as in, the one you most reinforce) to an RL training problem is one that the model perceives as something you wouldn’t want it to do, it will generally learn to do things you don’t want it to do. You can solve this by ensuring that the misaligned-coded

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