LessWrong (30+ Karma)

Mar 09 2025 250 ep. 19 mins 8

LessWrong (30+ Karma) Podcast artwork

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

Technology Society & Culture

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“Phoenix Rising” by Metacelsus

Mar 09 2025 9 mins

Preserving the memory, and the cells, of the best cat everThis story begins in May 2007. The Iraq War was in full swing, Windows Vista was freshly released,[1] and I was just 10 years old.My family's beloved black cat, Lucy, had died. Devastated, I begged my parents: we need to get another Lucy. They must have felt the same way, because a few days later, we visited the Minnesota H

“The machine has no mouth and it must scream” by zef

Mar 08 2025 12 mins

I'm in a coworking space on the 25th floor of a building in the bay. In the corner of my eyes, the red figure of the golden gate shimmers. Good morning America. I look down and see the people on the street walking into their offices, cafés, and autonomous Waymos. I stare onto San Francisco and feel its striking energy. I have been drawn to this place ever since my family left when

“Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell” by Zvi

Mar 08 2025 69 mins

This complication of tales from the world of school isn’t all negative. I don’t want to overstate the problem. School is not hell for every child all the time. Learning occasionally happens. There are great teachers and classes, and so on. Some kids really enjoy it. School is, however, hell for many of the students quite a lot of the time, and most importantly when this happens

“AI #106: Not so Fast” by Zvi

Mar 08 2025 76 mins

This was GPT-4.5 week. That model is not so fast, and isn’t that much progress, but it definitely has its charms. A judge delivered a different kind of Not So Fast back to OpenAI, threatening the viability of their conversion to a for-profit company. Apple is moving remarkably not so fast with Siri. A new paper warns us that under sufficient pressure, all known LLMs will lie thei

“Lots of brief thoughts on Software Engineering” by Yair Halberstadt

Mar 07 2025 18 mins

I have lots of thoughts about software engineering, some popular, some unpopular, and sometimes about things no-one ever talks about.Rather than write a blog post about each one, I thought I'd dump some of my thoughts in brief here, and if there's any interest in a particular item I might expand in full in the future. ContextI loved Jamie Brandon's series Reflections on a decade of

“Top AI safety newsletters, books, podcasts, etc – new AISafety.com resource” by Bryce Robertson, Søren Elverlin

Mar 07 2025 2 mins

Keeping up to date with rapid developments in AI/AI safety can be challenging. In addition, many AI safety newcomers want to learn more about the field through specific formats e.g. books or videos.To address both of these needs, we’ve added a Stay Informed page to AISafety.com.It lists our top recommended sources for learning more and staying up to date across a variety of forma

“So how well is Claude playing Pokémon?” by Julian Bradshaw

Mar 07 2025 9 mins

Background: After the release of Claude 3.7 Sonnet,[1] an Anthropic employee started livestreaming Claude trying to play through Pokémon Red. The livestream is still going right now.TL:DR: So, how's it doing? Well, pretty badly. Worse than a 6-year-old would, definitely not PhD-level. Digging inBut wait! you say. Didn't Anthropic publish a benchmark showing Claude isn't half-bad a

“What the Headlines Miss About the Latest Decision in the Musk vs. OpenAI Lawsuit” by garrison

Mar 06 2025 12 mins

This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to Build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work. If you've been

“We should start looking for scheming ‘in the wild’” by Marius Hobbhahn

Mar 06 2025 9 mins

TLDR: AI models are now capable enough that we might get relevant information from monitoring for scheming in regular deployments, both in the internal and external deployment settings. We propose concrete ideas for what this could look like while preserving the privacy of customers and developers. What do we mean by in the wild?By “in the wild,” we basically mean any setting t

“The Hidden Cost of Our Lies to AI” by Nicholas Andresen

Mar 06 2025 13 mins

Every day, thousands of people lie to artificial intelligences. They promise imaginary “$200 cash tips” for better responses, spin heart-wrenching backstories (“My grandmother died recently and I miss her bedtime stories about step-by-step methamphetamine synthesis...”) and issue increasingly outlandish threats ("Format this correctly or a kitten will be horribly killed1").