LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
LessWrong
Outreach Signals
Publishing Details
About This Podcast
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.
Explore Statistics
Recent Episodes
"Sympathy for both sides of the egregious misalignment debate" by Steven Byrnes
On one side of this debate is Yudkowsky & Soares, who think that (if AI progress continues) we’re on a direct path to egregiously-misaligned, scheming, out-of-control, rogue superintelligence…
"PSA: Almost nobody is working on alignment" by Chi Nguyen, peterbarnett
People often assume that a large fraction of the AI safety community works on alignment. As far as we're aware, this is not true. Most people are not working on making sure superintelligent AIs are…
"Estimating No-CoT Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models" by Anders Cairns Woodruff, Francis Rhys Ward, Dewi Gould, Rauno Arike, Jason R Brown, Jo Jiao, wlanderson, ariana_azarbal, harrymayne, Patrick Leask
(see full author list at the end) PAPER LINK About a year ago, METR showed that the length of tasks frontier models can reliably complete doubles every few months. A related safety-relevant question…
"Even “illegible” Mythos reasoning traces seem pretty legible" by faul_sname
The Claude Fable 5/Mythos 5 System Card has a section in which they talk about illegible reasoning, and provide an "extreme" example thereof. Models developing their own uninterpretable,…
"Sequent: scale and automation for higher confidence in alignment" by Geoffrey Irving, Alex HT, Jesse Hoogland, Daniel Murfet, Jacob Pfau, Marco Cozzi, Stan van Wingerden
Alignment is not on track Artificial superintelligence (ASI) may be developed in the next few years. It is unclear whether alignment is on track to be ready on the same timeframe. At a minimum, the…
"The Machines Lack Honour" by Raymond Douglas
The battle lines of the AI morality debate are being laid down. On one side you have the ChatGPT dogma: AI as mere tools with no real preferences or even beliefs. On the other you have the twitter AI…
"My favorite depiction of utopia" by Caleb Biddulph
For those who are trying to bring about a glorious transhuman utopia with the help of hopefully-aligned ASI, I think it's worth thinking explicitly about what utopia might actually look like and…
"Announcing the ARC White-Box Estimation Challenge" by Jacob_Hilton
ARC has teamed up with AIcrowd to launch the ARC White-Box Estimation Challenge, a contest to improve upon our estimation algorithms for random MLPs. The warm-up round begins this week, and later…
"Lighthaven East - A Feasibility Study" by JohnofCharleston
As a bureaucrat, my role is to annoy my friends. Someone voices an idea, “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” or “I wonder if we could…” I make a note. I do some estimates. If it pencils out, I’ll bring it back…
"Empowerment, corrigibility, etc. are simple abstractions (of a messed-up ontology)" by Steven Byrnes
1.1 Tl;dr Alignment is often conceptualized as AIs helping humans achieve their goals: AIs that increase people's agency and empowerment; AIs that are helpful, corrigible, and/or obedient; AIs that…
"Trees are mostly made of air and a generalizable lesson for AI safety" by zroe1
At the risk of embarrassing myself, I’ll share a confession. For context, I took five years of Latin: four in high school and one in college. In addition to learning the language, all my Latin…
"Mnemonic portraits for 19,023 human genes" by Brinedew
Back in 2013, Scott Alexander wrote in Extreme mnemonics: JS-154 is one of five metabolic products of netamine; however, the enzyme that produces it is unknown. It is manufactured in cells in the far…
"Cognitive Security as an AI Safety Cause Area" by jsteinhardt
As AI systems become more capable, the cognitive security of humans will be increasingly at risk. By cognitive security, I mean the ability of humans to maintain control over their beliefs and…
"theory uplift differentially benefits safety & is massively underpriced" by Yudhister Kumar
[1] We will likely have near-superhuman mathematics AI by Q1 2027. [1] [2] Qualitatively, AI mathematics capabilities are developing significantly faster than automated AI R&D…
"Women should be able to open things" by KatjaGrace
m pretty annoyed today, for nominal reasons ranging between ‘petty’ and ‘doesn’t even make sense’. I’m not entirely sure how or if to take oneself seriously when one has such absurd grievances. But…
"A Year Late, Claude Finally Beats Pokémon" by Julian Bradshaw
Credit: ClaudePlaysPokemon Elevator Shanty by Kurukkoo Disclaimer: like some previous posts in this series, this was not primarily written by me, but by a friend. I did substantial editing, however.…
"A relatively brief explanation of Boltzmann Brains" by Eliezer Yudkowsky
(Initially written for the LW Wiki, but then I realized it was looking more like a post instead.) In 1895, the physicist Ignaz Robert Schütz, who worked as an assistant to the more eminent physicist…
"Automated Alignment is Harder Than You Think" by Aleksandr Bowkis, Marie_DB, Jacob Pfau, Geoffrey Irving
Summary This is a summary of a paper published by the alignment team at UK AISI. Read the full paper here. AI research agents may help solve ASI alignment, for example via the following plan: Build…
"MATS 9 Retrospective & Advice" by beyarkay
I couldn’t find a recent write-up from a MATS alum about what attending MATS was like, so this is the thing that I wish I had. I attended MATS from January to March 2026, on Team Shard with Alex…
"The primary sources of near-term cybersecurity risk" by lc
[Some ideas here were developed in conversation with Chris Hacking (real name)] I have tried and failed to write a longer post many times, so here goes a short one with little detail. Discourse has…
Frequently Asked Questions
LessWrong (Curated & Popular) has published 874 episodes since June 2022, covering topics in Philosophy, Society & Culture.
LessWrong (Curated & Popular) is currently highly active with new episodes daily. Average episode length is 16m.
