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
For example, currently you are—I assume—trying to decide if you should stop reading this post and do something else with your life. If you’ve read this blog before, then lurking somew...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
The below is a reproduction of our X thread on...
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...
I think it’d be good if there was a powerful rationalist political machine to try to make those things...
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 ...
“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...
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...
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 ...
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...
- 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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