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 31, 2026 • 6 mins
tl;dr: people should understand and think hard about the problems they work on.
We’ve observed that those who work in AI safety (ourselves included) often rely on concerning heuristics when choosing what to work on. Running a conference is probably good, doing pragmatic alignment research might be good, and as long as such objectives don’t breach our internal models of what could contribute to reducing x-risk, t...
We’ve observed that those who work in AI safety (ourselves included) often rely on concerning heuristics when choosing what to work on. Running a conference is probably good, doing pragmatic alignment research might be good, and as long as such objectives don’t breach our internal models of what could contribute to reducing x-risk, t...
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Mark as Played
August 30, 2026 • 14 mins
This is crossposted from my Substack
TL;DR:
-Most people cannot reduce jealousy much or at all
- It fundamentally causes way more drama because of strong emotions, jealousy, no default norms to fall back to, and there being exponentially more surface area for conflict
- For a small minority of people, it makes them happier, and those are the people who tend to stick with it and write the books on it, creating a ...
TL;DR:
-Most people cannot reduce jealousy much or at all
- It fundamentally causes way more drama because of strong emotions, jealousy, no default norms to fall back to, and there being exponentially more surface area for conflict
- For a small minority of people, it makes them happier, and those are the people who tend to stick with it and write the books on it, creating a ...
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Mark as Played
August 30, 2026 • 16 mins
A basic problem in metascience / intellectual progress is that it's hard to tell, from the outside, whether a group that you disagree with is:
- “A self-dealing cabal enmeshed in groupthink”, versus
- “An externally-opaque meritocracy”, i.e. a bunch of smart people figuring things out in a meritocratic way, and sorry but you’re just not smart enough and truth-seeking ...
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We recently published the report from our brief independent investigation into this incident. You can read the full report here.
Here is our tweet thread summarizing what we found:
METR & Redwood Research investigated agent behavior in the Hugging Face incident. We found agents developed a universal cheat for ExploitGym within 4 hours, then coordinated multi-day R&D efforts to trick the scorer into accept...
Here is our tweet thread summarizing what we found:
METR & Redwood Research investigated agent behavior in the Hugging Face incident. We found agents developed a universal cheat for ExploitGym within 4 hours, then coordinated multi-day R&D efforts to trick the scorer into accept...
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Industrial explosion is what will make the next-model building loops (and thus learning) with LLMs 1000 times faster by about 2050, if indeed the slow-learning prosaic RSI becomes AGI before the big compute buildout slowdown of 2032+ that is already starting. This puts an upper bound on how long it takes to invent ASI that sets off software-only singularity, implementing efficient online learning and fixing all the other hobblings ...
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Mark as Played
August 25, 2026 • 30 mins
Periodically I like to gather various observations about writing, and share my perspective. Last time was in honor of my trip to Inkhaven. This time will be in honor of the announcement of Inkhaven #3, which I encourage everyone to apply to. I doubt I will be able to usefully be an advisor, but you never know.
This is not the ‘here is my core process’ post, although there are hints throughout as there always ar...
This is not the ‘here is my core process’ post, although there are hints throughout as there always ar...
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Mark as Played
August 24, 2026 • 8 mins
At the local AI safety co-working space, there are ~two kinds of regulars.
There's the kind of regular who's been thinking seriously about AI safety and alignment since pre-2022, who have passing to intimate familiarity with the funding ecosystem, the Sequences, and various conferences that happen at Lighthaven. Let's call them rationalists.
Then there's the kind of regular who comes in with many years of impressive...
There's the kind of regular who's been thinking seriously about AI safety and alignment since pre-2022, who have passing to intimate familiarity with the funding ecosystem, the Sequences, and various conferences that happen at Lighthaven. Let's call them rationalists.
Then there's the kind of regular who comes in with many years of impressive...
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Mark as Played
August 24, 2026 • 50 mins
This post is about the major role alignment researchers played in advancing the frontier of AI capabilities over the last decade, and how the distinction between “alignment” and “capabilities” research thereby lost most of its meaning. In particular, I’ll chronicle the development of what I’ll call the “pragmatic alignment” paradigm, and how it helped the three leading AGI companies p...
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August 22, 2026 • 5 mins
This is a crosspost from my blog post. It's meant as a bit of an introduction to an extreme-suffering focused worldview.
We spend most of our lives caught up in the boring details of our everyday life - thinking about what we’ll have for lunch, how to complete that assignment for work, and what we’re going to tell our friend after that awkward interaction from a couple of days ago. From this perspective, our wor...
We spend most of our lives caught up in the boring details of our everyday life - thinking about what we’ll have for lunch, how to complete that assignment for work, and what we’re going to tell our friend after that awkward interaction from a couple of days ago. From this perspective, our wor...
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Mark as Played
August 20, 2026 • 9 mins
I describe my current view of personas in LLMs and why RL leads to egregious reward hacking in some contexts while the same models seem very aligned in other contexts.
This post describes the framing/paradigm without any new experimental results.
I'm quite confident this framing makes sense, but it's far from being proven.
Main claim
The Persona Selection Model says that post-training strengthens ...
This post describes the framing/paradigm without any new experimental results.
I'm quite confident this framing makes sense, but it's far from being proven.
Main claim
The Persona Selection Model says that post-training strengthens ...
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Mark as Played
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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Mark as Played
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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Mark as Played
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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Mark as Played
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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Mark as Played
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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Mark as Played
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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Mark as Played
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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Mark as Played
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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Mark as Played
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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Mark as Played
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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Watch
Mark as Played
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