LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.
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Episodes
726 episodes
"Claude’s new constitution" by Zac Hatfield-Dodds
Read the constitution. Previously: 'soul document' discussion here. We're publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It's a detailed description of Anthropic's vision for Claude's values and behavior; a holistic document that...
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11:56
[Linkpost] "“The first two weeks are the hardest”: my first digital declutter" by mingyuan
This is a link post. It is unbearable to not be consuming. All through the house is nothing but silence. The need inside of me is not an ache, it is caustic, sour, the burning desire to be distracted, to be listening, watching, scrolling. ...
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4:28
"What Washington Says About AGI" by zroe1
I spent a few hundred dollars on Anthropic API credits and let Claude individually research every current US congressperson's position on AI. This is a summary of my findings. Disclaimer: Summarizing people's beliefs is hard and inherentl...
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14:16
"Precedents for the Unprecedented: Historical Analogies for Thirteen Artificial Superintelligence Risks" by James_Miller
Since artificial superintelligence has never existed, claims that it poses a serious risk of global catastrophe can be easy to dismiss as fearmongering. Yet many of the specific worries about such systems are not free-floating fantasies but exten...
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2:03:49
"Why we are excited about confession!" by boazbarak, Gabriel Wu, Manas Joglekar
Boaz Barak, Gabriel Wu, Jeremy Chen, Manas Joglekar [Linkposting from the OpenAI alignment blog, where we post more speculative/technical/informal results and thoughts on safety and alignment.] TL;DR We go into more details...
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17:28
"Backyard cat fight shows Schelling points preexist language" by jchan
Two cats fighting for control over my backyard appear to have settled on a particular chain-link fence as the delineation between their territories. This suggests that: Animals are capable of recognizing Schelling points...
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5:50
"How AI Is Learning to Think in Secret" by Nicholas Andresen
On Thinkish, Neuralese, and the End of Readable Reasoning In September 2025, researchers published the internal monologue of OpenAI's GPT-o3 as it decided to lie about scientific data. This is what it thought: Pardon? This looks l...
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37:44
"On Owning Galaxies" by Simon Lermen
It seems to be a real view held by serious people that your OpenAI shares will soon be tradable for moons and galaxies. This includes eminent thinkers like Dwarkesh Patel, Leopold Aschenbrenner, perhaps Scott Alexander and many more. According to...
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5:37
"AI Futures Timelines and Takeoff Model: Dec 2025 Update" by elifland, bhalstead, Alex Kastner, Daniel Kokotajlo
We’ve significantly upgraded our timelines and takeoff models! It predicts when AIs will reach key capability milestones: for example, Automated Coder / AC (full automation of coding) and superintelligence / ASI (much better than the best humans ...
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50:46
"In My Misanthropy Era" by jenn
For the past year I've been sinking into the Great Books via the Penguin Great Ideas series, because I wanted to be conversant in the Great Conversation. I am occasionally frustrated by this endeavour, but overall, it's been fun! I'm learning a l...
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13:51
"2025 in AI predictions" by jessicata
Past years: 2023 2024 Continuing a yearly tradition, I evaluate AI predictions from past years, and collect a convenience sample of AI predictions made this year. In terms of selection, I prefer selecting specific predictions, especially ...
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21:53
"Good if make prior after data instead of before" by dynomight
They say you’re supposed to choose your prior in advance. That's why it's called a “prior”. First, you’re supposed to say say how plausible different things are, and then you update your beliefs based on what you see in the world. For exa...
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17:47
"Measuring no CoT math time horizon (single forward pass)" by ryan_greenblatt
A key risk factor for scheming (and misalignment more generally) is opaque reasoning ability.One proxy for this is how good AIs are at solving math problems immediately without any chain-of-thought (CoT) (as in, in a single forward pass).I've mea...
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12:46
"Recent LLMs can use filler tokens or problem repeats to improve (no-CoT) math performance" by ryan_greenblatt
Prior results have shown that LLMs released before 2024 can't leverage 'filler tokens'—unrelated tokens prior to the model's final answer—to perform additional computation and improve performance.[1]I did an investigation on more recent models (e...
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36:52
"Turning 20 in the probable pre-apocalypse" by Parv Mahajan
Master version of this on https://parvmahajan.com/2025/12/21/turning-20.html 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...
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5:03
"Alignment Pretraining: AI Discourse Causes Self-Fulfilling (Mis)alignment" by Cam, Puria Radmard, Kyle O’Brien, David Africa, Samuel Ratnam, andyk
TL;DR 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-t...
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20:57
"Dancing in a World of Horseradish" by lsusr
Commercial airplane tickets are divided up into coach, business class, and first class. In 2014, Etihad introduced The Residence, a premium experience above first class. The Residence isn't very popular. The reason The Residence isn't ver...
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8:29
"Contradict my take on OpenPhil’s past AI beliefs" by Eliezer Yudkowsky
At many points now, I've been asked in private for a critique of EA / EA's history / EA's impact and I have ad-libbed statements that I feel guilty about because they have not been subjected to EA critique and refutation. I need to write up my ta...
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5:50
"Opinionated Takes on Meetups Organizing" by jenn
Screwtape, as the global ACX meetups czar, has to be reasonable and responsible in his advice giving for running meetups. And the advice is great! It is unobjectionably great. I am here to give you more objectionable advice, as an...
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15:53
"How to game the METR plot" by shash42
TL;DR: In 2025, we were in the 1-4 hour range, which has only 14 samples in METR's underlying data. The topic of each sample is public, making it easy to game METR horizon length measurements for a frontier lab, sometimes inadvertently. Finally, ...
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12:05
"Activation Oracles: Training and Evaluating LLMs as General-Purpose Activation Explainers" by Sam Marks, Adam Karvonen, James Chua, Subhash Kantamneni, Euan Ong, Julian Minder, Clément Dumas, Owain_Evans
TL;DR: We train LLMs to accept LLM neural activations as inputs and answer arbitrary questions about them in natural language. These Activation Oracles generalize far beyond their training distribution, for example uncovering misalignment or secr...
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20:15
"Scientific breakthroughs of the year" by technicalities
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...
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5:55
"A high integrity/epistemics political machine?" by Raemon
I have goals that can only be reached via a powerful political machine. Probably a lot of other people around here share them. (Goals include “ensure no powerful dangerous AI get built”, “ensure governance of the US and world are broadly good / n...
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19:04
"How I stopped being sure LLMs are just making up their internal experience (but the topic is still confusing)" by Kaj_Sotala
How it started 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 reaso...
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52:20