LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.
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Episodes
854 episodes
"The Owned Ones" by Eliezer Yudkowsky
(An LLM Whisperer placed a strong request that I put this story somewhere not on Twitter, so it could be scraped by robots not owned by Elon Musk. I perhaps do not fully understand or agree with the reasoning behind this request, but it costs me ...
"The Iliad Intensive Course Materials" by Leon Lang, David Udell, Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel
We are releasing the course materials of the Iliad Intensive, a new month-long and full-time AI Alignment course that runs in-person every second month. The course targets students with strong backgrounds in mathematics, physics, or theoretical c...
"The Darwinian Honeymoon - Why I am not as impressed by human progress as I used to be" by Elias Schmied
Crossposted from Substack and the EA Forum. A common argument for optimism about the future is that living conditions have improved a lot in the past few hundred years, billions of people have been lifted out of poverty, and...
"What I did in the hedonium shockwave, by Emma, age six and a half" by ozymandias
My name is Emma and I’m six and a half years old and I like pink and Pokemon and my cat River and I’m going to be swallowed by a hedonium shockwave soon, except you already know that about me because everyone else is too. “Hedonium shockw...
"Bad Problems Don’t Stop Being Bad Because Somebody’s Wrong About Fault Analysis" by Linch
Here's a dynamic I’ve seen at least a dozen times: Alice: Man that article has a very inaccurate/misleading/horrifying headline. Bob: Did you know, *actually* article writers don't write their own he...
"x-risk-themed" by kave
Sometimes, a friend who works around here, at an x-risk-themed organisation, will think about leaving their job. They’ll ask a group of people “what should I do instead?”. And everyone will chime in with ideas for other x-risk-themed orgs that th...
"Natural Language Autoencoders Produce Unsupervised Explanations of LLM Activations" by Subhash Kantamneni, kitft, Euan Ong, Sam Marks
Abstract We introduce Natural Language Autoencoders (NLAs), an unsupervised method for generating natural language explanations of LLM activations. An NLA consists of two LLM modules: an activation verbalizer (AV) that ma...
[Linkpost] "Interpreting Language Model Parameters" by Lucius Bushnaq, Dan Braun, Oliver Clive-Griffin, Bart Bussmann, Nathan Hu, mivanitskiy, Linda Linsefors, Lee Sharkey
This is a link post. This is the latest work in our Parameter Decomposition agenda. We introduce a new parameter decomposition method, adVersarial Parameter Decomposition (VPD)[1] and decompose the parameters of a small[2] language model with it. ...
"It’s nice of you to worry about me, but I really do have a life" by Viliam
I have two shameful secrets that I probably shouldn't talk about online: I love my family.I enjoy my hobbies. "What an idiot!" you probably think. "Doesn't he realize that at his next job int...
"Irretrievability; or, Murphy’s Curse of Oneshotness upon ASI" by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Example 1: The Viking 1 lander In the 1970s, NASA sent a pair of probes to Mars, Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions, at a total cost of 1 billion dollars[1970], equivalent to about 7 billion dollars[2025]. The Viking 1 probe ...
"Dairy cows make their misery expensive (but their calves can’t)" by Elizabeth
How much do cows suffer in the production of milk? I can’t answer that; understanding animal experience is hard. But I can at least provide some facts about the conditions dairy cows live in, which might be useful to you in making your own assess...
"Takes from two months as an aspiring LLM naturalist" by AnnaSalamon
I spent my last two months playing around with LLMs. I’m a beginner, bumbling and incorrect, but I want to share some takes anyhow.[1] Take 1. Everything with computers is so so much easier than it was a year ago. ...
"Intelligence Dissolves Privacy" by Vaniver
The future is going to be different from the present. Let's think about how. Specifically, our expectations about what's reasonable are downstream of our past experiences, and those experiences were downstream of our options (and the opti...
"How Go Players Disempower Themselves to AI" by Ashe Vazquez Nuñez
Written as part of the MATS 9.1 extension program, mentored by Richard Ngo. From March 9th to 15th 2016, Go players around the world stayed up to watch their game fall to AI. Google DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, commonly understo...
"On today’s panel with Bernie Sanders" by David Scott Krueger
It's sort of easy to forget how close Bernie Sanders was to becoming the most powerful person in the world. The world we live in feels so much not like that place. I’m in Washington DC for the next week, and I’ve just finished a public ap...
"Not a Paper: “Frontier Lab CEOs are Capable of In-Context Scheming”" by LawrenceC
(Fragments from a research paper that will never be written) Extended Abstract. The frontier AI developers are becoming increasingly powerful and wealthy, significantly increasing their potential for risks. One concern is that of...
"llm assistant personas seem increasingly incoherent (some subjective observations)" by nostalgebraist
(This was originally going to be a "quick take" but then it got a bit long. Just FYI.) There's this weird trend I perceive with the personas of LLM assistants over time. It feels like they're getting less "coherent" in a certain sense, ev...
"LessWrong Shows You Social Signals Before the Comment" by TurnTrout
When reading comments, you see is what other people think before reading the comment. As shown in an RCT, that information anchors your opinion, reducing your ability to form your own opinion and making the site's karma rankings less related to t...
"Update on the Alex Bores campaign" by Eric Neyman
In October, I wrote a post arguing that donating to Alex Bores's campaign for Congress was among the most cost-effective opportunities that I'd ever encountered. (A bit of context: Bores is a state legislator in New York who championed th...
"Community misconduct disputes are not about facts" by mingyuan
In criminal law, the prosecution and the defense each try to establish a timeline — what happened, where, when, who was involved — and thereby determine whether the defendant is actually guilty of a crime.[1] Community misconduct disputes...
"The paper that killed deep learning theory" by LawrenceC
Around 10 years ago, a paper came out that arguably killed classical deep learning theory: Zhang et al. 's aptly titled Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization. Of course, this is a bit of an exaggeration. No single...
"Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It" by mabramov
Summary EA and rationalists got enamoured with forecasting and prediction markets and made them part of the culture, but this hasn’t proven very useful, yet it continues to receive substantial EA funding. We should cut it off. My...
"Your Supplies Probably Won’t Be Stolen in a Disaster" by jefftk
When I write about things like storing food or medication in case of disaster, one common response I get is that it doesn't matter: society will break down, and people who are stronger than you will take your stuff. This seemed plausible at...
"10 posts I don’t have time to write" by habryka
I am a busy man and will die knowing I have not said all I wanted to say. But maybe I can at least leave some IOUs behind. 1) Blatant conflicts are the best kind Ben Hoffman's "Blatant Lies are the B...
"$50 million a year for a 10% chance to ban ASI" by Andrea_Miotti, Alex Amadori, Gabriel Alfour
ControlAI's mission is to avert the extinction risks posed by superintelligent AI. We believe that in order to do this, we must secure an international prohibition on its development. We're working to make this happen through what we bel...