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.
Episodes
November 12, 2025 • 30 mins
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 pos...
The goal of this pos...
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November 10, 2025 • 11 mins
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 mys...
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 mys...
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November 9, 2025 • 8 mins
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 ...
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 ...
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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 ...
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November 6, 2025 • 7 mins
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 Econom...
Recently, jointly with Klaus Prettner, we’ve written a paper on “The Economics of p(doom): Scenarios of Existential Risk and Econom...
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November 5, 2025 • 15 mins
[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 II...
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 II...
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November 5, 2025 • 3 mins
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 p...
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November 4, 2025 • 11 mins
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 co...
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 co...
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November 4, 2025 • 1 min
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 Inkhav...
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 Inkhav...
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November 4, 2025 • 39 mins
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:
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:
- I...
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November 3, 2025 • 3 mins
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...
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...
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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 bac...
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November 2, 2025 • 19 mins
Crosspost from my blog.
Synopsis
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 communi...
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November 2, 2025 • 17 mins
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 t...
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 t...
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October 31, 2025 • 21 mins
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 ...
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October 30, 2025 • 16 mins
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 comp...
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 comp...
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October 30, 2025 • 7 mins
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 ...
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October 29, 2025 • 23 mins
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 wi...
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October 28, 2025 • 6 mins
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 ...
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October 27, 2025 • 142 mins
(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 Dia...
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 Dia...
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