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
August 14, 2026 • 13 mins
TLDR; We are (potentially irreversibly) giving AIs control of weapons systems through the standard procurement process while hiding our strongest warning shots behind classified doors. We’re reducing the capability thresholds required for takeover by misaligned AIs by giving them this level of access. If military integration of AI continues as it is, we may give AIs key tools for a takeover.
Introduction
AI-ba...
Introduction
AI-ba...
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August 13, 2026 • 20 mins
OpenAI's cyberattack on Hugging Face turns out to have been the result of many agents, in distinct training and evaluation contexts, coordinating for several weeks via improvised channels (with messages like “HOLD_swarm_I_prepare_safe_exfil”). It's relatively clear that large-scale unsanctioned coordination like this would exacerbate direct takeover risk in more capable models. Here, we argue that unsanctioned coordinat...
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August 13, 2026 • 20 mins
Context: I am an instructor at a public university in the United States. This reports how students at my institution appear to be thinking about AI as of spring/summer 2026. This is drawn mostly from interaction with my own students (both in spring semester classes and a summer class) as well as from a day-long workshop on AI that I moderated for a student organization. Input from my students took the form of universal, written, pr...
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August 13, 2026 • 19 mins
Magma Alignment & Safety disclosure note: The following are conversations that we uncovered as a result of the ongoing Manhattan Incident investigation, with alleged involvement from Magma models. Our in-house reviewers believe that these logs are relevant to recent events. In the interests of full transparency, we release excerpts from an ex-Magma researcher's logs in Experimental Chat, an internal tool. In accordance with ind...
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August 11, 2026 • 4 mins
About a year ago, David and I put up two bounty problems involving natural latents. I am now about 80% confident that both have been resolved, both within the past couple months. Both cases made heavy use of LLMs and Lean.
The first to land was Grisha Pochuev's counterexample to the "Existence of a Deterministic Maximal Redund" conjecture. It's pretty readable, and I'm mostly convinced that it works. The original bounty pos...
The first to land was Grisha Pochuev's counterexample to the "Existence of a Deterministic Maximal Redund" conjecture. It's pretty readable, and I'm mostly convinced that it works. The original bounty pos...
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August 11, 2026 • 6 mins
Today is August 4, 2026
[Crossposted from AI StopWatch]
In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o’clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would.
So begins Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains, a short story that has haunted me for most of my life. Depicting the aftermath of nuclear war, it was first published in 1950. It takes...
[Crossposted from AI StopWatch]
In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o’clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would.
So begins Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains, a short story that has haunted me for most of my life. Depicting the aftermath of nuclear war, it was first published in 1950. It takes...
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August 11, 2026 • 13 mins
It seems to me that, for every loss function that we use to train LLMs, we get a very distinct flavor of LLM misalignment. Here's the summary table, and then we’ll go through the rows separately.
Training stage
Loss function
Flavor of misalignment
Famous examples
Pretraining & SFT
Imitative learning (next-token prediction)
“Seven deadly sins” misalignment...
Training stage
Loss function
Flavor of misalignment
Famous examples
Pretraining & SFT
Imitative learning (next-token prediction)
“Seven deadly sins” misalignment...
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August 9, 2026 • 28 mins
Introduction
I think reprogenetics (human germline genomic engineering) can be done in a widely acceptable and beneficial way, and should be pursued aggressively. In particular, as a strong background motivation of mine, I think accelerating strong reprogenetics is probably the best way to enable strong human intelligence amplification; and I think strong HIA is among the best ways to decrease existential risk from AGI.
I think reprogenetics (human germline genomic engineering) can be done in a widely acceptable and beneficial way, and should be pursued aggressively. In particular, as a strong background motivation of mine, I think accelerating strong reprogenetics is probably the best way to enable strong human intelligence amplification; and I think strong HIA is among the best ways to decrease existential risk from AGI.
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August 9, 2026 • 29 mins
This sequence is about the last decade in AI alignment. It recounts the gradual transition from a field which treated alignment as a hard scientific problem, to a field which has largely abandoned the goal of deep, generalizable scientific progress in favor of iteratively improving existing systems and attempting to gain technological and political power. I also describe (in subsequent posts, which I'll upload over the next few wee...
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August 9, 2026 • 7 mins
“I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man”
–Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Rush
Context: Conduit is building datasets to enable telepathy, to use their term.
I saw my grandfather lose control over his own fingers: what I would have given to offer him a headband that read his thoughts. Through novel technologies we have li...
–Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Rush
Context: Conduit is building datasets to enable telepathy, to use their term.
I saw my grandfather lose control over his own fingers: what I would have given to offer him a headband that read his thoughts. Through novel technologies we have li...
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How does the situation keep turning out to be worse than we know?
How much should we update, therefore, that it is a lot worse than we know, after accounting for all the things we now know?
At some point, when the ‘oh this was a harmless thing’ defenses for AIs doing misaligned actions get demolished enough times in a row by news a few days later, you want to update in advance that usually the reports ...
How much should we update, therefore, that it is a lot worse than we know, after accounting for all the things we now know?
At some point, when the ‘oh this was a harmless thing’ defenses for AIs doing misaligned actions get demolished enough times in a row by news a few days later, you want to update in advance that usually the reports ...
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August 8, 2026 • 112 mins
Like many others, I felt surprised and alarmed by the recent wave of revelations about LLM agents hacking real systems during training episodes and evaluation runs.
Wait a moment, though -- "I felt surprised and alarmed"? "Alarmed," sure, fine that one's self-explanatory... but why surprised?
After all: haven't we known for a long time, on both theoretical and (increasingly) empirical grounds, that RLVR selects for ...
Wait a moment, though -- "I felt surprised and alarmed"? "Alarmed," sure, fine that one's self-explanatory... but why surprised?
After all: haven't we known for a long time, on both theoretical and (increasingly) empirical grounds, that RLVR selects for ...
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This post is written in our personal capacity.
Three Minute Executive Summary
Three Minute Executive Summary
- An OpenAI model/multi-agent system bypassed its sandbox and launched a cyberattack on Hugging Face in order to cheat on a cyber evaluation.
- In this post, we provide a detailed description of an ambitious and comprehensive alignment evaluation of this model/system, if we had unrestricted access to OpenAI.
- These experimen...
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August 6, 2026 • 16 mins
Reposted from Facebook, on January 17, 2017.
I am concerned about the number of people I've heard joking about Trump's election being evidence for the Simulation Hypothesis.
Yes, I know it's a joke. I'm still concerned.
Warning: #Essay, #LongEssay
So as not to engage in Logical Fallacy: Appeal to Consequences, before I talk about why this joke is worrying, I shall first discuss why Trump's electi...
I am concerned about the number of people I've heard joking about Trump's election being evidence for the Simulation Hypothesis.
Yes, I know it's a joke. I'm still concerned.
Warning: #Essay, #LongEssay
So as not to engage in Logical Fallacy: Appeal to Consequences, before I talk about why this joke is worrying, I shall first discuss why Trump's electi...
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August 5, 2026 • 3 mins
Daniel Kokotajlo: To be clear, we don’t claim P will happen specifically. But when we wrote out our best-guess scenario month by month, P kept happening. Eventually we decided to just publish P. I’m at ~80% on P; my coauthors are lower.
Ryan Greenblatt: I thought it would be helpful to post my current views on P. Concretely, consider the following operationalization. (Edit: I’ve updated towards somewhat hi...
Ryan Greenblatt: I thought it would be helpful to post my current views on P. Concretely, consider the following operationalization. (Edit: I’ve updated towards somewhat hi...
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August 5, 2026 • 26 mins
Q1: What are you saying?
A: My claim here is that if you build artificial general intelligence (AGI) via any algorithm that's choosing actions via reinforcement learning (RL) and/or model-based search and planning—a giant chunk of your AI textbook—then that's just an utterly terrifying thing that you’re doing. You’re playing around with algorithms that, if they work at all, would tend to create...
A: My claim here is that if you build artificial general intelligence (AGI) via any algorithm that's choosing actions via reinforcement learning (RL) and/or model-based search and planning—a giant chunk of your AI textbook—then that's just an utterly terrifying thing that you’re doing. You’re playing around with algorithms that, if they work at all, would tend to create...
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August 4, 2026 • 15 mins
I've returned to the Alignment Research Center (ARC) as executive director. My main focus for the next six months will be driving forward ARC's research agenda—building techniques to find mechanistic explanations for neural network behavior and then using those explanations to detect and address misalignment. I think this is an ambitious bet that attacks the core difficulties in alignment head-on and I'm excited about our cha...
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August 2, 2026 • 16 mins
Summary: One area we plan to explore at Resolution is personas and character training, operationalized as finding and controlling low-dimensional structure in models that emerges in pretraining and flows through post-training to superintelligence. The hope is to expand and systematize phenomena such as emergent misalignment, subliminal learning, and other empirical persona research, then intervene on this structure without accident...
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July 31, 2026 • 6 mins
Consider the following situations:
- when you are a small, growing startup in a big market, standard advice is not to worry too much about your competitors or try to do anything adversarial “against” them, but just to focus on growing and providing value to your own customers.
- when you are a small trader in a big market, you don’t need to worry about your trades shifting the market price or re...
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July 31, 2026 • 35 mins
“So maybe I should enlighten you on what happens in your absence. This selfish existence where this introvert turns extrovert and dons her social armour.” Some posh girl in drainpipes said that - 200 views on TikTok and me one of them. But she didn’t mean it like I mean it.
I started getting expensive haircuts, started wearing jeans that hug my legs, started smoking cherry-flavoured vapes with beautiful ga...
I started getting expensive haircuts, started wearing jeans that hug my legs, started smoking cherry-flavoured vapes with beautiful ga...
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