LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Mar 25 2025 473 ep. 23 mins 214

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) Podcast artwork

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

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“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

“Intention to Treat” by Alicorn

Mar 22 2025 3 mins

When my son was three, we enrolled him in a study of a vision condition that runs in my family. They wanted us to put an eyepatch on him for part of each day, with a little sensor object that went under the patch and detected body heat to record when we were doing it. They paid for his first pair of glasses and all the eye doctor visits to check up on how he was coming along, plus

“On the Rationality of Deterring ASI” by Dan H

Mar 21 2025 9 mins

I’m releasing a new paper “Superintelligence Strategy” alongside Eric Schmidt (formerly Google), and Alexandr Wang (Scale AI). Below is the executive summary, followed by additional commentary highlighting portions of the paper which might be relevant to this collection of readers. Executive Summary Rapid advances in AI are poised to reshape nearly every aspect of society. Go

[Linkpost] “METR: Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks” by Zach Stein-Perlman

Mar 19 2025 1 mins

This is a link post. Summary: We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under a decade, we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fract

“I make several million dollars per year and have hundreds of thousands of followers—what is the straightest line path to utilizing these resources to reduce existential-level AI threats?” by shrimpy

Mar 19 2025 2 mins

I have, over the last year, become fairly well-known in a small corner of the internet tangentially related to AI. As a result, I've begun making what I would have previously considered astronomical amounts of money: several hundred thousand dollars per month in personal income. This has been great, obviously, and the funds have alleviated a fair number of my personal burdens (most

“Claude Sonnet 3.7 (often) knows when it’s in alignment evaluations” by Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill, Mikita Balesni, Jérémy Scheurer, Marius Hobbhahn

Mar 18 2025 18 mins

Note: this is a research note based on observations from evaluating Claude Sonnet 3.7. We’re sharing the results of these ‘work-in-progress’ investigations as we think they are timely and will be informative for other evaluators and decision-makers. The analysis is less rigorous than our standard for a published paper. Summary We monitor Sonnet's reasoning for mentions that i