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LessWrong posts by zvi

zvi

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi

technology philosophy

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106:39

“Claude Mythos: The System Card” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/04/09

Claude Mythos is different.This is the first model other than GPT-2 that is at first not being released for public use at all. With GPT-2 the delay was due to a general precautionary principle. OpenAI did not know what they had, or what effect on demand text would have on various systems. It sounds funny now, GPT-2 was harmless, but at the time the concern was highly reasonable. The decision not to release Claude Mythos is not about an amorphous fear. If given to anyone with a credit card,

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84:22

“AI #163: Mythos Quest” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/04/08

There exists an AI model, Claude Mythos, that has discovered critical safety vulnerabilities in every major operating system and browser. If released today it would likely break the internet and be chaos. If they had wanted to, they could have used it themselves and owned pretty much everyone.Luckily for all of us, Anthropic did no such thing. Instead, Anthropic is launching Project Glasswing, and making Mythos available to cybersecurity companies, so everyone can patch all the world's critical

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45:46

“OpenAI #16: A History and a Proposal” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/04/07

The real news today is that Anthropic has partnered with the top companies in cybersecurity to try and patch everyone's systems to fix all the thousands of zero-day exploits found by their new model Claude Mythos.I’ll be sorting through that over the coming days. For now, we instead have stories from OpenAI. In particular there are three stories. There's a massive 18,000 word article in The New Yorker about Sam Altman and the history of OpenAI as it relates to his trustworthiness. No trust.

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28:15

“Housing Roundup #13: More Dakka” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/04/06

Build more housing where people want to live. The rest is commentary. If there is enough housing, it will be affordable, people will afford more house, and people will be able to live where they want to live. It's always been that simple. Increased supply of any kind of housing increases affordability of all kinds of housing. Are there other things that would also be helpful? Yes, but they’re commentary. Freeing up existing underused housing, for example, is helpful. It is commentary. Let's

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67:14

“AI #161 Part 2: Every Debate on AI” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/03/30

AI discorce. AI discorce never changes. That's not actually true. But it is true to a rather frustrating degree, for those of us who need to be in the thick of it all the time. It is especially true if someone says the word ‘pause,’ whether or not they would actually support one. Play it again, Sam. Meanwhile, you know what changes a lot? Actual AI capabilities. Also, war. In any case, here's the policy, discourse and alignment side of the week that was. Table of Contents The OpenAI

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58:16

“Anthropic vs. DoW #6: The Court Rules” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/03/27

Last night, Anthropic was given its preliminary injunction, with a stay of seven days.Emil Michael is a very angry person right now. So is the Honorable Judge Lin. We were worried we would draw a judge that had no idea how any of this worked and would give the government absurd deference or buy into nonsense arguments. That is not how it played out. Judge Lin very much understood the issues in play, as they did not require a technical background. She hammered the government in the hearing, and

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55:46

“AI #161 Part 1: 80,000 Interviews” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/03/26

The major technical advances this week were in agentic coding, as covered yesterday. The major non-DoW political and alignment developments will be covered tomorrow. The DoW vs. Anthropic trial continues. Judge Lin was very not happy with the government's case, which makes sense since the government has no case and was arguing a variety of Obvious Nonsense. The question now is how much preliminary relief Anthropic is entitled to. Assuming we find that out this week, I plan to cover that on

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35:30

“Claude Code, Cowork and Codex #6: Claude Code Auto...

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/03/25

Whatever else you think about Anthropic's agentic coding department, they ship.The highlights of this edition are three related big upgrades. You can use Dispatch to command Claude Code and Claude Cowork from your phone, or use channels to do it via places such as Telegram or Discord. Claude Cowork now can outright use your keyboard and mouse, giving it access to actual everything one can do with a computer if it is competent to do so. Claude Code now has auto mode, where a classifier checks

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210:24

“Book Review: Open Socrates (Part 1)” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/03/24

These are all important, in their own way, call it a treasure hunt and collect them all… “Know thyself.” – The Oracle “Know thine enemy and know thyself; in a hundred battles, you will not be defeated.” – Sun Tzu “You don’t know me. You don’t know me at all.” – Lisa Loeb, ‘You Don’t Know Me’ “Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.” – The Graduate “And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.” – Someone Guessing “I didn’t know I had permission to murder and to

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147:56

“Book Review: Open Socrates (Part 2)” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/03/24

Yesterday I posted Part 1. Read that first. This is Part 2 of 2. Table of Contents The Socratic Method. The Paradox Paradox. Rubber Ducking. Coherent Extrapolated Volition. The Cult Leader Breaks You Down. The Cult Leader Builds You Back Up. Did You Know There Are Tradeoffs In Epistemics. You Came Here For An Argument. You Have Completed Building The Oracle. How Refutation Works. The Problem Is Not Having A Problem. What Is Love Justice? Things That Are Not Entirely Virtuous.

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98:45

“AI #160: What Passes For a Pause” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/03/19

A lot happened, but by today's standards this felt like a quiet week. I was happy for the break, and I hope that we get to continue relatively relaxing. The Anthropic PBC vs. Department of War case is working its way through the system. The government responded on Tuesday, and the preliminary hearing is next week. I covered that here. Once that is out of the way, I plan to cover Anthropic's RSP v3, both the fact that it went back on previous promises and an analysis of its new more flexible

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19:33

“Anthropic vs. DoW #5: Motions Filed” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/03/18

The news has thankfully quieted down on this front, and is mostly about the lawsuit as we build towards a hearing next week, after which we will find out if a temporary restraining order or an injunction is on the table.The government arguments were going to be terrible no matter what, given the terrible set of facts and who was directing the argument, and their decision not to narrow their scope or compromise. But Anthropic has an uphill battle to try and get a random court to give them advance

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61:04

“Monthly Roundup #40: March 2026” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/03/16

It is that time again. After events surrounding Anthropic and the Department of War, I plan on taking full advantage of whatever lulls I can get. Things are only going to move faster over time. That means a higher bar for coverage, and it means potentially skipping more days, or using those days for short posts that either spin off fun little things or that embody concepts I want to refer back to over time. In the meantime, here's everything that doesn’t go anywhere else, and that does not want

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54:47

“GPT-5.4 Is A Substantial Upgrade” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/03/11

Benchmarks have never been less useful for telling us which models are best.They are good for giving a general sense of the landscape. They definitely paint a picture. But if you’re comparing top models, like GPT-5.4 against Opus 4.6 against Gemini 3.1 Pro, you have to use the models, talk to the models, get reports from those who have and form a gestalt. The reports will contract each other and you have to work through that. There's no other way. Thus, I try to gather and sort a reasonably

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19:54

“Gemini 3.1 Pro Aces Benchmarks, I Suppose” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/03/04

I’ve been trying to find a slot for this one for a while. I am thrilled that today had sufficiently little news that I am comfortable posting this.Gemini 3.1 scores very well on benchmarks, but most of us had the same reaction after briefly trying it: “It's a Gemini model.” And that was that, given our alternatives. But it's got its charms. Consider this a nice little, highly skippable break. The Pitch It's a good model, sir. That's the pitch. Sundar Pichai (CEO Google): Gemini 3.1 Pro

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107:53

“AI #157: Burn the Boats” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/02/26

Events continue to be fast and furious.This was the first actually stressful week of the year. That was mostly due to issues around Anthropic and the Department of War. This is the big event the news is not picking up, with the Pentagon on the verge of invoking one of two extreme options that would both be extremely damaging to national security and that would potentially endanger our Republic. The post has details, and the first section here has a few additional notes. Also stressful for many

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60:51

“Anthropic and the Department of War” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/02/25

The situation in AI in 2026 is crazy. The confrontation between Anthropic and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is a new level of crazy. It risks turning quite bad for all. There's also nothing stopped it from turning out fine for everyone.By at least one report the recent meeting between the two parties was cordial and all business, but Anthropic has been given a deadline of 5pm eastern on Friday to modify its existing agreed-upon contract to grant ‘unfettered access’ to Claude, or else. Anthropic

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20:10

“Claude Sonnet 4.6 Gives You Flexibility” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/02/23

Anthropic first gave us Claude Opus 4.6, then followed up with Claude Sonnet 4.6. For most purposes Sonnet 4.6 is not as capable as Opus 4.6, but it is not that far behind, it would have been fully frontier-level a few months ago, and it is faster and cheaper than Opus. That has its advantages, including that Sonnet is in the free plan, and it seems outright superior for computer use. Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 is available now on all plans, Cowork, Claude Code, our API, and all major cloud

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76:30

“Monthly Roundup #39: February 2026” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/02/18

There really is a lot going on these days.I held off posting this because I was trying to see if I could write a net helpful post about the current situation involving Anthropic and the Pentagon. Anthropic very much wants to help DoW defend our country and make us strong. It is clear there have been some large misunderstandings here about how LLMs work. They are not ordinary tools like spreadsheets that automatically do whatever the user asks, nor would it be safe to make them so, nor do they

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42:03

“ChatGPT-5.3-Codex Is Also Good At Coding” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi ·

2026/02/13

OpenAI is back with a new Codex model, released the same day as Claude Opus 4.6.The headline pitch is it combines the coding skills of GPT-5.2-Codex with the general knowledge and skills of other models, along with extra speed and improvements in the Codex harness, so that it can now handle your full stack agentic needs. We also got the Codex app for Mac, which is getting positive reactions, and quickly picked up a million downloads. CPT-5.3-Codex is only available inside Codex. It is not in

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