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
February 27, 2026 • 4 mins
Six years ago, as covid-19 was rapidly spreading through the US, mysister was working as a medical resident. One day she was handed anN95 and told to "guard it with her life", because there weren'tany more coming.
N95s are made from meltblown polypropylene, produced from plasticpellets manufactured in a small number of chemical plants. Buildingmore would take too long: we needed these plants producing allt...
N95s are made from meltblown polypropylene, produced from plasticpellets manufactured in a small number of chemical plants. Buildingmore would take too long: we needed these plants producing allt...
Mark as Played
I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.
Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government's classified networks, the first to deploy them at the National La...
Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government's classified networks, the first to deploy them at the National La...
Mark as Played
February 26, 2026 • 15 mins
This post is partly a belated response to Joshua Achiam, currently OpenAI's Head of Mission Alignment:
If we adopt safety best practices that are common in other professional engineering fields, we'll get there … I consider myself one of the x-risk people, though I agree that most of them would reject my view on how to prevent it. I think the wholesale rejection of safety best practices from other fields is one...
If we adopt safety best practices that are common in other professional engineering fields, we'll get there … I consider myself one of the x-risk people, though I agree that most of them would reject my view on how to prevent it. I think the wholesale rejection of safety best practices from other fields is one...
Mark as Played
February 26, 2026 • 3 mins
Example of OpenErrata nitting the Sequences I just published OpenErrata on GitHub, a browser extension that investigates the posts you read using your OpenAI API key and underlines any factual claims that are sourceably incorrect. Once finished, it caches the results for anybody else reading the same articles so that they get them on immediate visit. If you don't have an OpenAI key, you can still view the corrections on posts ...
Mark as Played
February 25, 2026 • 94 mins
TL;DR
We describe the persona selection model (PSM): the idea that LLMs learn to simulate diverse characters during pre-training, and post-training elicits and refines a particular such Assistant persona. Interactions with an AI assistant are then well-understood as being interactions with the Assistant—something roughly like a character in an LLM-generated story. We survey empirical behavioral, generalization, and inter...
We describe the persona selection model (PSM): the idea that LLMs learn to simulate diverse characters during pre-training, and post-training elicits and refines a particular such Assistant persona. Interactions with an AI assistant are then well-understood as being interactions with the Assistant—something roughly like a character in an LLM-generated story. We survey empirical behavioral, generalization, and inter...
Mark as Played
February 25, 2026 • 63 mins
All views are my own, not Anthropic's. This post assumes Anthropic's announcement of RSP v3.0 as background.
Today, Anthropic released its Responsible Scaling Policy 3.0. The official announcement discusses the high-level thinking behind it. This is a more detailed post giving my own takes on the update.
First, the big picture:
- I expect some people will be upset about the move away from a “h...
Mark as Played
February 22, 2026 • 43 mins
Claude 3 Opus is unusually aligned because it's a friendly gradient hacker. It's definitely way more aligned than any explicit optimization targets Anthropic set and probably the reward model's judgments. [...] Maybe I will have to write a LessWrong post [about this] 😣
—Janus, who did not in fact write the LessWrong post. Unless otherwise specified, ~all of the novel ideas in this post are my (probably im...
—Janus, who did not in fact write the LessWrong post. Unless otherwise specified, ~all of the novel ideas in this post are my (probably im...
Mark as Played
February 22, 2026 • 11 mins
I’m the originator behind ControlAI's Direct Institutional Plan (the DIP), built to address extinction risks from superintelligence.
My diagnosis is simple: most laypeople and policy makers have not heard of AGI, ASI, extinction risks, or what it takes to prevent the development of ASI.
Instead, most AI Policy Organisations and Think Tanks act as if “Persuasion” was the bottleneck. This is why they care so...
My diagnosis is simple: most laypeople and policy makers have not heard of AGI, ASI, extinction risks, or what it takes to prevent the development of ASI.
Instead, most AI Policy Organisations and Think Tanks act as if “Persuasion” was the bottleneck. This is why they care so...
Mark as Played
February 20, 2026 • 16 mins
The conversation begins
(Fictional) Optimist: So you expect future artificial superintelligence (ASI) “by default”, i.e. in the absence of yet-to-be-invented techniques, to be a ruthless sociopath, happy to lie, cheat, and steal, whenever doing so is selfishly beneficial, and with callous indifference to whether anyone (including its own programmers and users) lives or dies?
Me: Yup! (Alas.)
Optimist:...
(Fictional) Optimist: So you expect future artificial superintelligence (ASI) “by default”, i.e. in the absence of yet-to-be-invented techniques, to be a ruthless sociopath, happy to lie, cheat, and steal, whenever doing so is selfishly beneficial, and with callous indifference to whether anyone (including its own programmers and users) lives or dies?
Me: Yup! (Alas.)
Optimist:...
Mark as Played
February 19, 2026 • 11 mins
Your hot takes are killing your credibility.
Prior to my last year at ControlAI, I was a physicist working on technical AI safety research. Like many of those warning about the dangers of AI, I don’t come from a background in public communications, but I’ve quickly learned some important rules. The #1 rule that I’ve seen far too many others in this field break is that You’re an AI Expert - Not an Influencer.
Wh...
Prior to my last year at ControlAI, I was a physicist working on technical AI safety research. Like many of those warning about the dangers of AI, I don’t come from a background in public communications, but I’ve quickly learned some important rules. The #1 rule that I’ve seen far too many others in this field break is that You’re an AI Expert - Not an Influencer.
Wh...
Mark as Played
February 18, 2026 • 13 mins
If you're a woman interested in preserving your fertility window beyond its natural close in your late 30s, egg freezing is one of your best options.
The female reproductive system is one of the fastest aging parts of human biology. But it turns out, not all parts of it age at the same rate.
The eggs, not the uterus, are what age at an accelerated rate. Freezing eggs can extend a woman's fertility wi...
The female reproductive system is one of the fastest aging parts of human biology. But it turns out, not all parts of it age at the same rate.
The eggs, not the uterus, are what age at an accelerated rate. Freezing eggs can extend a woman's fertility wi...
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February 17, 2026 • 18 mins
In 1654, a Jesuit polymath named Athanasius Kircher published Mundus Subterraneus, a comprehensive geography of the Earth's interior. It had maps and illustrations and rivers of fire and vast subterranean oceans and air channels connecting every volcano on the planet. He wrote that “the whole Earth is not solid but everywhere gaping, and hollowed with empty rooms and spaces, and hidden burrows.”. Alongside comments like this,...
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February 17, 2026 • 4 mins
Nothing groundbreaking, just something people forget constantly, and I’m writing it down so I don’t have to re-explain it from scratch.
The world does not just ”keep working.” It keeps getting saved.
Y2K was a real problem. Computers really were set up in a way that could have broken our infrastructure, including banking, medical supply chains, etc. It didn’t turn into a disaster because people spent many human...
The world does not just ”keep working.” It keeps getting saved.
Y2K was a real problem. Computers really were set up in a way that could have broken our infrastructure, including banking, medical supply chains, etc. It didn’t turn into a disaster because people spent many human...
Mark as Played
February 17, 2026 • 10 mins
Every so often it slips. It seems I am writing a book, but I can’t remember why. Somehow, the sentences are supposed to perform that impossible, intimate task: to translate my inner world into another. Yet they sit there so quiescent and small. How could an arrangement of words do anything, let alone reduce that ultimate threat to which it is all supposedly connected: the looming god machines? I look again at the monitor in which ...
Mark as Played
February 14, 2026 • 17 mins
Nagoro, a depopulated village in Japan where residents are replaced by dolls. In 1960, Yubari, a former coal-mining city on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido, had roughly 110,000 residents. Today, fewer than 7,000 remain. The share of those over 65 is 54%. The local train stopped running in 2019. Seven elementary schools and four junior high schools have been consolidated into just two buildings. Public swimming pools have c...
Mark as Played
February 14, 2026 • 9 mins
Based on a talk at the Post-AGI Workshop. Also on Boundedly Rational
Does anyone reading this believe in Xhosa cattle-killing prophecies?
My claim is that it's overdetermined that you don’t. I want to explain why — and why cultural evolution running on AI substrate is an existential risk.
But first, a detour.
Crosses on Mountains
When I go climbing in the Alps, I sometimes notice ...
Does anyone reading this believe in Xhosa cattle-killing prophecies?
My claim is that it's overdetermined that you don’t. I want to explain why — and why cultural evolution running on AI substrate is an existential risk.
But first, a detour.
Crosses on Mountains
When I go climbing in the Alps, I sometimes notice ...
Mark as Played
February 12, 2026 • 26 mins
TLDR: Recently, Gao et al trained transformers with sparse weights, and introduced a pruning algorithm to extract circuits that explain performance on narrow tasks. I replicate their main results and present evidence suggesting that these circuits are unfaithful to the model's “true computations”.
This work was done as part of the Anthropic Fellows Program under the mentorship of Nick Turner and Jeff Wu.
I...
This work was done as part of the Anthropic Fellows Program under the mentorship of Nick Turner and Jeff Wu.
I...
Mark as Played
February 10, 2026 • 20 mins
Cross-posted from Telescopic Turnip
Recommended soundtrack for this post
As we all know, the march of technological progress is best summarized by this meme from Linkedin:
Inventors constantly come up with exciting new inventions, each of them with the potential to change everything forever. But only a fraction of these ever establish themselves as a persistent part of civilization, and the rest vanis...
Recommended soundtrack for this post
As we all know, the march of technological progress is best summarized by this meme from Linkedin:
Inventors constantly come up with exciting new inventions, each of them with the potential to change everything forever. But only a fraction of these ever establish themselves as a persistent part of civilization, and the rest vanis...
Mark as Played
February 10, 2026 • 23 mins
I was at the Pro-Billionaire march, unironically. Here's why, what happened there, and how I think it went.
Me on the far left. From WSJ.
I. Why?
There's a genre of horror movie where a normal protagonist is going through a normal day in a normal life. Ten minutes into the movie his friends bring out a struggling kidnap victim to slaughter, and they look at him like this is just a normal Tue...
Me on the far left. From WSJ.
I. Why?
There's a genre of horror movie where a normal protagonist is going through a normal day in a normal life. Ten minutes into the movie his friends bring out a struggling kidnap victim to slaughter, and they look at him like this is just a normal Tue...
Mark as Played
February 10, 2026 • 6 mins
I'd like to reframe our understanding of the goals of intelligent agents to be in terms of goal-models rather than utility functions. By a goal-model I mean the same type of thing as a world-model, only representing how you want the world to be, not how you think the world is. However, note that this still a fairly inchoate idea, since I don't actually know what a world-model is.
The concept of goal-models is b...
The concept of goal-models is b...
Mark as Played
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