LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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

"Why You Don’t Believe in Xhosa Prophecies" by Jan_Kulveit

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 ...
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"Weight-Sparse Circuits May Be Interpretable Yet Unfaithful" by jacob_drori

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...
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"My journey to the microwave alternate timeline" by Malmesbury

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...
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"Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good" by Eneasz

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...
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"On Goal-Models" by Richard_Ngo

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...
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"Prompt injection in Google Translate reveals base model behaviors behind task-specific fine-tuning" by megasilverfist

February 9, 2026 • 7 mins
tl;dr Argumate on Tumblr found you can sometimes access the base model behind Google Translate via prompt injection. The result replicates for me, and specific responses indicate that (1) Google Translate is running an instruction-following LLM that self-identifies as such, (2) task-specific fine-tuning (or whatever Google did instead) does not create robust boundaries between "content to process" and "instructions ...
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"Near-Instantly Aborting the Worst Pain Imaginable with Psychedelics" by eleweek

February 8, 2026 • 28 mins
Psychedelics are usually known for many things: making people see cool fractal patterns, shaping 60s music culture, healing trauma. Neuroscientists use them to study the brain, ravers love to dance on them, shamans take them to communicate with spirits (or so they say).

But psychedelics also help against one of the world's most painful conditions — cluster headaches. Cluster headaches usually strike on one side of t...
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"Post-AGI Economics As If Nothing Ever Happens" by Jan_Kulveit

February 7, 2026 • 16 mins
When economists think and write about the post-AGI world, they often rely on the implicit assumption that parameters may change, but fundamentally, structurally, not much happens. And if it does, it's maybe one or two empirical facts, but nothing too fundamental.

This mostly worked for all sorts of other technologies, where technologists would predict society to be radically transformed e.g. by everyone having mos...
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"IABIED Book Review: Core Arguments and Counterarguments" by Stephen McAleese

February 4, 2026 • 50 mins
The recent book “If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies” (September 2025) by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares argues that creating superintelligent AI in the near future would almost certainly cause human extinction:

If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then ever...
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    "Anthropic’s “Hot Mess” paper overstates its case (and the blog post is worse)" by RobertM

    February 4, 2026 • 11 mins
    Author's note: this is somewhat more rushed than ideal, but I think getting this out sooner is pretty important. Ideally, it would be a bit less snarky.

    Anthropic[1] recently published a new piece of research: The Hot Mess of AI: How Does Misalignment Scale with Model Intelligence and Task Complexity? (arXiv, Twitter thread).

    I have some complaints about both the paper and the accompanying blog post.
    <...
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    "Conditional Kickstarter for the “Don’t Build It” March" by Raemon

    February 3, 2026 • 6 mins
    tl;dr: You can pledge to join a big protest to ban AGI research at ifanyonebuildsit.com/march, which only triggers if 100,000 people sign up.

    The If Anyone Builds It website includes a March page, wherein you can pledge to march in Washington DC, demanding an international treaty to stop AGI research if 100,000 people in total also pledge.

    I designed the March page (although am not otherwise involved with March...
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    "How to Hire a Team" by Gretta Duleba

    February 1, 2026 • 8 mins
    A low-effort guide I dashed off in less than an hour, because I got riled up.

    1. Try not to hire a team. Try pretty hard at this.
      1. Try to find a more efficient way to solve your problem that requires less labor – a smaller-footprint solution.
      2. Try to hire contractors to do specific parts that they’re really good at, and who have a well-defined interface. Your relationship to these contractors will mostly be transact...
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    "The Possessed Machines (summary)" by L Rudolf L

    January 29, 2026 • 16 mins
    The Possessed Machines is one of the most important AI microsites. It was published anonymously by an ex- lab employee, and does not seem to have spread very far, likely at least partly due to this anonymity (e.g. there is no LessWrong discussion at the time I'm posting this). This post is my attempt to fix that.

    I do not agree with everything in the piece, but I think cultural critiques of the "AGI uniparty&qu...
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    "Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance" by Martin Sustrik

    January 28, 2026 • 26 mins
    Papal election of 1492 For over a decade, Ada Palmer, a history professor at University of Chicago (and a science-fiction writer!), struggled to teach Machiavelli. “I kept changing my approach, trying new things: which texts, what combinations, expanding how many class sessions he got…” The problem, she explains, is that “Machiavelli doesn’t unpack his contemporary examples, he assumes that you lived through it and know, so sometim...
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    "AI found 12 of 12 OpenSSL zero-days (while curl cancelled its bug bounty)" by Stanislav Fort

    January 28, 2026 • 20 mins
    This is a partial follow-up to AISLE discovered three new OpenSSL vulnerabilities from October 2025.

    TL;DR: OpenSSL is among the most scrutinized and audited cryptographic libraries on the planet, underpinning encryption for most of the internet. They just announced 12 new zero-day vulnerabilities (meaning previously unknown to maintainers at time of disclosure). We at AISLE discovered all 12 using our AI system. This is...
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    "Dario Amodei – The Adolescence of Technology" by habryka

    January 27, 2026 • 114 mins
    Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has written a new essay on his thoughts on AI risk of various shapes. It seems worth reading, even if just for understanding what Anthropic is likely to do in the future.

    Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI

    There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan's book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an...
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    "AlgZoo: uninterpreted models with fewer than 1,500 parameters" by Jacob_Hilton

    January 27, 2026 • 21 mins
    Audio note: this article contains 78 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.

    This post covers work done by several researchers at, visitors to and collaborators of ARC, including Zihao Chen, George Robinson, David Matolcsi, Jacob Stavrianos, Jiawei Li and Michael Sklar. Thanks to Aryan Bhatt, Gabriel Wu, Jiawei Li, Lee Sha...
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    "Does Pentagon Pizza Theory Work?" by rba

    January 27, 2026 • 11 mins
    As soon as modern data analysis became a thing, the US government has had to deal with people trying to use open source data to uncover its secrets.

    During the early Cold War days and America's hydrogen bomb testing, there was an enormous amount of speculation about how the bombs actually worked. All nuclear technology involves refinement and purification of large amounts of raw substances into chemically pure subst...
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    "The inaugural Redwood Research podcast" by Buck, ryan_greenblatt

    January 26, 2026 • 3 mins
    After five months of me (Buck) being slow at finishing up the editing on this, we’re finally putting out our inaugural Redwood Research podcast. I think it came out pretty well—we discussed a bunch of interesting and underdiscussed topics and I’m glad to have a public record of a bunch of stuff about our history. Tell your friends! Whether we do another one depends on how useful people find this one. You can watch on Youtube here,...
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    "Canada Lost Its Measles Elimination Status Because We Don’t Have Enough Nurses Who Speak Low German" by jenn

    January 26, 2026 • 15 mins
    This post was originally published on November 11th, 2025. I've been spending some time reworking and cleaning up the Inkhaven posts I'm most proud of, and completed the process for this one today.

    Today, Canada officially lost its measles elimination status. Measles was previously declared eliminated in Canada in 1998, but countries lose that status after 12 months of continuous transmission.

    Here ar...
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