LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Apr 01 2025 476 ep. 23 mins 215

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) Podcast artwork

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.

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“VDT: a solution to decision theory” by L Rudolf L

Apr 01 2025 8 mins

Introduction Decision theory is about how to behave rationally under conditions of uncertainty, especially if this uncertainty involves being acausally blackmailed and/or gaslit by alien superintelligent basilisks. Decision theory has found numerous practical applications, including proving the existence of God and generating endless LessWrong comments since the beginning of time.

“LessWrong has been acquired by EA” by habryka

Apr 01 2025 1 mins

Dear LessWrong community, It is with a sense of... considerable cognitive dissonance that I announce a significant development regarding the future trajectory of LessWrong. After extensive internal deliberation, modeling of potential futures, projections of financial runways, and what I can only describe as a series of profoundly unexpected coordination challenges, the Lightcone In

“We’re not prepared for an AI market crash” by Remmelt

Apr 01 2025 3 mins

Our community is not prepared for an AI crash. We're good at tracking new capability developments, but not as much the company financials. Currently, both OpenAI and Anthropic are losing $5 billion+ a year, while under threat of losing users to cheap LLMs. A crash will weaken the labs. Funding-deprived and distracted, execs struggle to counter coordinated efforts to restrict their

“Conceptual Rounding Errors” by Jan_Kulveit

Mar 28 2025 6 mins

Epistemic status: Reasonably confident in the basic mechanism. Have you noticed that you keep encountering the same ideas over and over? You read another post, and someone helpfully points out it's just old Paul's idea again. Or Eliezer's idea. Not much progress here, move along. Or perhaps you've been on the other side: excitedly telling a friend about some fascinating new insight

“Tracing the Thoughts of a Large Language Model” by Adam Jermyn

Mar 28 2025 22 mins

[This is our blog post on the papers, which can be found at https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html and https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/methods.html.] Language models like Claude aren't programmed directly by humans—instead, they‘re trained on large amounts of data. During that training process, they learn their own strateg

“Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit” by lc

Mar 25 2025 14 mins

About nine months ago, I and three friends decided that AI had gotten good enough to monitor large codebases autonomously for security problems. We started a company around this, trying to leverage the latest AI models to create a tool that could replace at least a good chunk of the value of human pentesters. We have been working on this project since since June 2024. Within the fi

“AI for AI safety” by Joe Carlsmith

Mar 25 2025 34 mins

(Audio version here (read by the author), or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. This is the fourth essay in a series that I’m calling “How do we solve the alignment problem?”. I’m hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see this introduction for a summary of the essays that have been released thus far, and for a bit mor

“Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong” by jimrandomh

Mar 25 2025 4 mins

LessWrong has been receiving an increasing number of posts and contents that look like they might be LLM-written or partially-LLM-written, so we're adopting a policy. This could be changed based on feedback. Humans Using AI as Writing or Research Assistants Prompting a language model to write an essay and copy-pasting the result will not typically meet LessWrong's standards. Please

“Will Jesus Christ return in an election year?” by Eric Neyman

Mar 24 2025 7 mins

Thanks to Jesse Richardson for discussion. Polymarket asks: will Jesus Christ return in 2025? In the three days since the market opened, traders have wagered over $100,000 on this question. The market traded as high as 5%, and is now stably trading at 3%. Right now, if you wanted to, you could place a bet that Jesus Christ will not return this year, and earn over $13,000 if you're

“Good Research Takes are Not Sufficient for Good Strategic Takes” by Neel Nanda

Mar 22 2025 6 mins

TL;DR Having a good research track record is some evidence of good big-picture takes, but it's weak evidence. Strategic thinking is hard, and requires different skills. But people often conflate these skills, leading to excessive deference to researchers in the field, without evidence that that person is good at strategic thinking specifically. Introduction I often find myself givi