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
- Mike Tyson
(The exact phrasing of that quote changes, this is my favourite.)
I think there is an open, important weakness in many people. We assume those we communicate with are basically trustworthy. Further, I think there is an important flaw in the current rationality community. We spend a lot of time focusing on subtle epistemi...
The obvious explanation for most of those mistakes is that decision makers do not have access to the information necessary to avoid the mistake, or are not smart/competent enough to think through the consequences of their actions.
This predicts that as decision-makers get access to more information, or are replaced with smarter people, their decisions will get b...
Alas, we do not get to choose the definitions of commonly used words; our attempted definitions will simply be wrong. Unless we stick to mathematics, we will end up sneaking in intuitions which do not follow from our so-called definitions, and thereby mislead ourselves. People who claim that they use some standard word or phrase according to ...
The goal of this pos...
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...
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 ...
Recently, jointly with Klaus Prettner, we’ve written a paper on “The Economics of p(doom): Scenarios of Existential Risk and Econom...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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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