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
Prior results have shown that LLMs released before 2024 can't leverage 'filler tokens'—unrelated tokens prior to the model's final answer—to perform additional computation and improve performance.[1]I did an investigation on more recent models (e.g. Opus 4.5) and found that many recent LLMs improve substantially on math problems when given filler tokens.That is, I force the LLM to answer some math question imme...
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December 23, 2025 • 5 mins
Master version of this on https://parvmahajan.com/2025/12/21/turning-20.html
I turn 20 in January, and the world looks very strange. Probably, things will change very quickly. Maybe, one of those things is whether or not we’re still here.
This moment seems very fragile, and perhaps more than most moments will never happen again. I want to capture a little bit of what it feels like to be alive right now.
I turn 20 in January, and the world looks very strange. Probably, things will change very quickly. Maybe, one of those things is whether or not we’re still here.
This moment seems very fragile, and perhaps more than most moments will never happen again. I want to capture a little bit of what it feels like to be alive right now.
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TL;DR
LLMs pretrained on data about misaligned AIs themselves become less aligned. Luckily, pretraining LLMs with synthetic data about good AIs helps them become more aligned. These alignment priors persist through post-training, providing alignment-in-depth. We recommend labs pretrain for alignment, just as they do for capabilities.
Website: alignmentpretraining.ai
Us: geodesicresearch.org | x.com/geodesr...
LLMs pretrained on data about misaligned AIs themselves become less aligned. Luckily, pretraining LLMs with synthetic data about good AIs helps them become more aligned. These alignment priors persist through post-training, providing alignment-in-depth. We recommend labs pretrain for alignment, just as they do for capabilities.
Website: alignmentpretraining.ai
Us: geodesicresearch.org | x.com/geodesr...
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December 22, 2025 • 8 mins
Commercial airplane tickets are divided up into coach, business class, and first class. In 2014, Etihad introduced The Residence, a premium experience above first class. The Residence isn't very popular.
The reason The Residence isn't very popular is because of economics. A Residence flight is almost as expensive as a private charter jet. Private jets aren't just a little bit better than commercial flights...
The reason The Residence isn't very popular is because of economics. A Residence flight is almost as expensive as a private charter jet. Private jets aren't just a little bit better than commercial flights...
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December 21, 2025 • 5 mins
At many points now, I've been asked in private for a critique of EA / EA's history / EA's impact and I have ad-libbed statements that I feel guilty about because they have not been subjected to EA critique and refutation. I need to write up my take and let you all try to shoot it down.
Before I can or should try to write up that take, I need to fact-check one of my take-central beliefs about how the last c...
Before I can or should try to write up that take, I need to fact-check one of my take-central beliefs about how the last c...
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December 21, 2025 • 15 mins
Screwtape, as the global ACX meetups czar, has to be reasonable and responsible in his advice giving for running meetups.
And the advice is great! It is unobjectionably great.
I am here to give you more objectionable advice, as another organizer who's run two weekend retreats and a cool hundred rationality meetups over the last two years. As the advice is objectionable (in that, I can see reasonable people...
And the advice is great! It is unobjectionably great.
I am here to give you more objectionable advice, as another organizer who's run two weekend retreats and a cool hundred rationality meetups over the last two years. As the advice is objectionable (in that, I can see reasonable people...
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December 21, 2025 • 12 mins
TL;DR: In 2025, we were in the 1-4 hour range, which has only 14 samples in METR's underlying data. The topic of each sample is public, making it easy to game METR horizon length measurements for a frontier lab, sometimes inadvertently. Finally, the “horizon length” under METR's assumptions might be adding little information beyond benchmark accuracy. None of this is to criticize METR—in research, its hard to be perfect ...
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TL;DR: We train LLMs to accept LLM neural activations as inputs and answer arbitrary questions about them in natural language. These Activation Oracles generalize far beyond their training distribution, for example uncovering misalignment or secret knowledge introduced via fine-tuning. Activation Oracles can be improved simply by scaling training data quantity and diversity.
The below is a reproduction of our X thread on...
The below is a reproduction of our X thread on...
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December 17, 2025 • 5 mins
A couple of years ago, Gavin became frustrated with science journalism. No one was pulling together results across fields; the articles usually didn’t link to the original source; they didn't use probabilities (or even report the sample size); they were usually credulous about preliminary findings (“...which species was it tested on?”); and they essentially never gave any sense of the magnitude or the baselines (“how mu...
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December 17, 2025 • 19 mins
I have goals that can only be reached via a powerful political machine. Probably a lot of other people around here share them. (Goals include “ensure no powerful dangerous AI get built”, “ensure governance of the US and world are broadly good / not decaying”, “have good civic discourse that plugs into said governance.”)
I think it’d be good if there was a powerful rationalist political machine to try to make those things...
I think it’d be good if there was a powerful rationalist political machine to try to make those things...
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How it started
I used to think that anything that LLMs said about having something like subjective experience or what it felt like on the inside was necessarily just a confabulated story. And there were several good reasons for this.
First, something that Peter Watts mentioned in an early blog post about LaMDa stuck with me, back when Blake Lemoine got convinced that LaMDa was conscious. Watts noted that LaMDa ...
I used to think that anything that LLMs said about having something like subjective experience or what it felt like on the inside was necessarily just a confabulated story. And there were several good reasons for this.
First, something that Peter Watts mentioned in an early blog post about LaMDa stuck with me, back when Blake Lemoine got convinced that LaMDa was conscious. Watts noted that LaMDa ...
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December 15, 2025 • 22 mins
Previous: 2024, 2022
“Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn't really matter.” –attributed to DL Moody[1]
1. Background & threat model
The main threat model I’m working to address is the same as it's been since I was hobby-blogging about AGI safety in 2019. Basically, I think that:
“Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn't really matter.” –attributed to DL Moody[1]
1. Background & threat model
The main threat model I’m working to address is the same as it's been since I was hobby-blogging about AGI safety in 2019. Basically, I think that:
- The “secret sauce” of human intelligence is a...
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December 14, 2025 • 17 mins
This is the abstract and introduction of our new paper.
Links: 📜 Paper, 🐦 Twitter thread, 🌐 Project page, 💻 Code
Authors: Jan Betley*, Jorio Cocola*, Dylan Feng*, James Chua, Andy Arditi, Anna Sztyber-Betley, Owain Evans (* Equal Contribution)
You can train an LLM only on good behavior and implant a backdoor for turning it bad. How? Recall that the Terminator is bad in the original film bu...
Links: 📜 Paper, 🐦 Twitter thread, 🌐 Project page, 💻 Code
Authors: Jan Betley*, Jorio Cocola*, Dylan Feng*, James Chua, Andy Arditi, Anna Sztyber-Betley, Owain Evans (* Equal Contribution)
You can train an LLM only on good behavior and implant a backdoor for turning it bad. How? Recall that the Terminator is bad in the original film bu...
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December 13, 2025 • 17 mins
Credit: Nano Banana, with some text provided. You may be surprised to learn that ClaudePlaysPokemon is still running today, and that Claude still hasn't beaten Pokémon Red, more than half a year after Google proudly announced that Gemini 2.5 Pro beat Pokémon Blue. Indeed, since then, Google and OpenAI models have gone on to beat the longer and more complex Pokémon Crystal, yet Claude has made no real progress on Red since Clau...
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December 13, 2025 • 4 mins
People working in the AI industry are making stupid amounts of money, and word on the street is that Anthropic is going to have some sort of liquidity event soon (for example possibly IPOing sometime next year). A lot of people working in AI are familiar with EA, and are intending to direct donations our way (if they haven't started already). People are starting to discuss what this might mean for their own personal donations...
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December 11, 2025 • 36 mins
Highly capable AI systems might end up deciding the future. Understanding what will drive those decisions is therefore one of the most important questions we can ask.
Many people have proposed different answers. Some predict that powerful AIs will learn to intrinsically pursue reward. Others respond by saying reward is not the optimization target, and instead reward “chisels” a combination of context-dependent cognitive ...
Many people have proposed different answers. Some predict that powerful AIs will learn to intrinsically pursue reward. Others respond by saying reward is not the optimization target, and instead reward “chisels” a combination of context-dependent cognitive ...
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December 9, 2025 • 4 mins
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 comin...
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 comin...
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December 8, 2025 • 63 mins
Executive Summary
- The Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team has made a strategic pivot over the past year, from ambitious reverse-engineering to a focus on pragmatic interpretability:
- Trying to directly solve problems on the critical path to AGI going well[[1]]
- Carefully choosing problems according to our comparative advantage
- Measuring progress with empirical feedback on proxy tasks
- We believe...
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December 8, 2025 • 41 mins
This is the editorial for this year's "Shallow Review of AI Safety". (It got long enough to stand alone.)
Epistemic status: subjective impressions plus one new graph plus 300 links.
Huge thanks to Jaeho Lee, Jaime Sevilla, and Lexin Zhou for running lots of tests pro bono and so greatly improving the main analysis.
tl;dr
Epistemic status: subjective impressions plus one new graph plus 300 links.
Huge thanks to Jaeho Lee, Jaime Sevilla, and Lexin Zhou for running lots of tests pro bono and so greatly improving the main analysis.
tl;dr
- Informed people disagree about the prospects for L...
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December 7, 2025 • 16 mins
"How are you coping with the end of the world?" journalists sometimes ask me, and the true answer is something they have no hope of understanding and I have no hope of explaining in 30 seconds, so I usually answer something like, "By having a great distaste for drama, and remembering that it's not about me." The journalists don't understand that either, but at least I haven't wasted much time alo...
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