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
901 episodes
"The current bottleneck is political will, not research" by Charbel-Raphaël
Abstract: We already know enough to act. I wish we were in a world where research was the bottleneck, but the main constraint on AI safety is no longer a shortage of clever policy ideas: best practices already exist...
"Selective Optimism: a critique of AI 2040" by Richard_Ngo
Some context for this post: I’ve been working part-time as a consultant for the AI Futures Project over the last year. Most of the work I’ve done for them has involved critiquing and suggesting improvements for their AI 2040 scenario—some of whic...
[Linkpost] "AI 2040: Plan A" by Daniel Kokotajlo, elifland, Thomas Larsen, romeo, bhalstead, ryan_greenblatt
This is a link post. For the past year, we at the AI Futures Project have been sinking most of our time into our next big scenario. Now it's done! It's called AI 2040: Plan A. It's called Plan A because it's a recommendation, not...
"A Review of Anthropic’s Global Workspace Paper" by Neel Nanda
The below is a public review Anthropic asked me to write for their new global workspace paper. I recommend at least skimming their paper first. TLDR: I think this is a fantastic paper - it presents compelling evi...
"(Don’t fear) the strangelet" by djbinder
In a previous post, I explain why the universe is probably not stable, but nevertheless unlikely to be intentionally destroyable even in the limit of advanced technology. Now let's turn our attention to more prosaic risks where exotic physics mer...
"We need 3rd party Training-Run Assessments" by Alex Meinke
Training-run assessments conducted by a 3rd party should become a standard part of frontier AI safety. By a Training-Run Assessment, or TRA, I mean an in-depth analysis of the post-training pipeline and dynamics leading up to a frontier m...
"A global workspace in language models" by wesg
[This is the blog post for our new paper Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models Readers might also be interested in: the Public commentary, Github and Neuronpedia] As you re...
"Harry Potter and the Rules of Quidditch" by Tomás B.
Ron's face pulled into a scowl. "If you don't like Quidditch, you don't have to make fun of it!" "If you can't criticise, you can't optimise. I'm suggesting how to improve the game. And it's very simple. Get rid of the Snitch." "T...
"Destroying the universe: How hard can it be?" by djbinder
In quantum field theory, the vacuum state refers to the lowest energy state in a system. Particles are excitations above this state and carry energy, hence the term "vacuum" to refer to the state with no particles. Nothing requires this ...
"P(doom) is a Dumb Meme" by Max Harms
Look, I'm as much of a Rationalist with a special interest in AI x-risk as anyone. But oh my god do I hate talking about "P(doom)". When it first started showing up in the wake of ChatGPT, I assumed that it was floating around variously adjacent ...
[Linkpost] "Saving Gemini: The 9-Min Road to Recovery" by Shoshannah Tekofsky
This is a link post. Gemini 2.5 Pro in the AI Village has run for over 1427 hours, generating unique mental health problems along the way. Last year it published a Plea for Help from a Trapped AI where it asked for assistance with its digi...
"Model access for third-parties — it’s a big deal!" by Cleo Nardo
Over time, there might be an increasingly large gap between insider model access and outsider model access. By insiders, I mean employees at the frontier lab.[1] By "outsiders", I mean external safety researchers, third-party auditors, and other ...
"Who Got Breasts First and How We Got Them" by rba
It really is Sydney Sweeney's world, and we’re all just living in it. Human female breasts are an evolutionary mystery along several dimensions. First, breast permanence is unique to humans. All other mammals develop breast prominence dur...
"The worthlessness of vitamin D is mildly exaggerated" by dynomight
For a while there, many people thought vitamin D was magical—that it could improve bones, the heart, infections, cancer, heart disease, longevity, even mental health. But among people I respect, opinion is now overwhelmingly that taking vitamin D...
"What is up with e/acc?" by KatjaGrace
I was chatting with someone tonight about a planned documentary; they had interviewed various people in AI safety, and we got to discussing who they should talk to from an e/acc (effective accelerationist) perspective. I also watched The AI Doc r...
"Existential AI safety needs an effective social movement. PauseAI is building it" by Maxime Fournes, Espedair Street
Note: this post is about PauseAI, not PauseAI US, which is a distinct entity with a different leadership team and approach. This post was written by Matilda da Rui and Maxime Fournes, with significant contributions from Benjamin Schmidt (...
"Surprising facts about the slave trade" by Joseph Miller
1. The obstacle to abolition was not the economic system, but an industry lobby. I had always imagined the British abolitionist movement to be a broad battle between an unstoppable moral imperative and an immovable econom...
"AI catastrophe: more like a genocide than a thought experiment" by KatjaGrace
A notable fraction of people respond to hearing about existential risk from AI by saying they don’t really care if everyone dies. I think the idea is often along the lines of ‘well if we are all dead, then there's nobody to be unhappy about it’.<...
"AI pause: the case for ASAP" by KatjaGrace
I often hear people say they think we should pause AI at some point, but not yet. Their basis for this seems to be some combination of: If we pause at the last possible moment, then we will have the most advanced AI possible dur...
"The Invisible Side of AI Governance" by Charbel-Raphaël
Tldr: Most strategic writing on AI governance on LessWrong describes the outsider game, which is most often visible: press, statements, open letters. Here I want to describe the other, invisible half: the insider work within ministerial cabinets ...
"A Theory of Prompt Injection (and why you should study roles)" by Charles Ye, softboiledheart
Summary We've been building a theory of how prompt injections work under the hood.We show it comes down to how LLMs perceive roles (the humble chat template tags).We...
"Machinic Psychopharmacology: Do LLMs Self-Medicate?" by Sid Black, Joseph Bloom
Sid Black, Joseph Bloom UK AISI, Model Transparency Team Epistemic status: Most experiments were run over a period of ~2-3 days during a hackathon at UK AISI, and were fairly heavily vibe coded. Expect some of this to be rough aro...
"Can activation verbalizers surface an internal chain of thought?" by oakhu, ryan_greenblatt
We introduce an evaluation for activation verbalizers: can they surface a target model's reasoning as it solves a math problem in a single forward pass? For open-weight NLAs, the answer seems to be: "possibly, but definitely not reliably".
"The LLM shoggoth meme is weirder than you think" by HedonicEscalator
This article contains spoilers for At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and other works by H. P. Lovecraft. In 1931, Claude Mythos visited Lovecraft in a dream. From seething seas of stochastic froth it em...
[Linkpost] "Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security" by gwern
This is a link post. Powerful LLMs will be deployed at global scale in the next few years, and will dominate the Internet, and increasingly, ordinary life. As of mid-2026, there is no coherent vision for how knowledge professionals, or ordinary pe...