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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.
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Recent Episodes
"Schelling Goodness, and Shared Morality as a Goal" by Andrew_Critch
Also available in markdown at theMultiplicity.ai/blog/schelling-goodness. This post explores a notion I'll call Schelling goodness. Claims of Schelling goodness are not first-order moral verdicts…
"Maybe there’s a pattern here?" by dynomight
1. It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the…
"OpenAI’s surveillance language has many potential loopholes and they can do better" by Tom Smith
(The author is not affiliated with the Department of War or any major AI company.) There's a lot of disagreement about the new surveillance language in the OpenAI–Department of War agreement. Some…
"An Alignment Journal: Coming Soon" by Dan MacKinlay, JessRiedel, Edmund Lau, Daniel Murfet, Scott Aaronson, Jan_Kulveit
tl;dr We’re incubating an academic journal for AI alignment: rapid peer-review of foundational Alignment research that the current publication ecosystem underserves. Key bets: paid attributed review,…
"Frontier AI companies probably can’t leave the US" by Anders Woodruff
It's plausible that, over the next few years, US-based frontier AI companies will become very unhappy with the domestic political situation. This could happen as a result of democratic backsliding,…
"Persona Parasitology" by Raymond Douglas
There was a lot of chatter a few months back about "Spiral Personas" — AI personas that spread between users and models through seeds, spores, and behavioral manipulation. Adele Lopez's definitive…
"Here’s to the Polypropylene Makers" by jefftk
Six years ago, as covid-19 was rapidly spreading through the US, mysister was working as a medical resident. One day she was handed anN95 and told to "guard it with her life", because there…
"Anthropic: “Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War”" by Matrice Jacobine
I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries. Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to…
"Are there lessons from high-reliability engineering for AGI safety?" by Steven Byrnes
This post is partly a belated response to Joshua Achiam, currently OpenAI's Head of Mission Alignment: If we adopt safety best practices that are common in other professional engineering fields,…
"Open sourcing a browser extension that tells you when people are wrong on the internet" by lc
Example of OpenErrata nitting the Sequences I just published OpenErrata on GitHub, a browser extension that investigates the posts you read using your OpenAI API key and underlines any factual claims…
"The persona selection model" by Sam Marks
TL;DR We describe the persona selection model (PSM): the idea that LLMs learn to simulate diverse characters during pre-training, and post-training elicits and refines a particular such Assistant…
"Responsible Scaling Policy v3" by HoldenKarnofsky
All views are my own, not Anthropic's. This post assumes Anthropic's announcement of RSP v3.0 as background.Today, Anthropic released its Responsible Scaling Policy 3.0. The official announcement…
"Did Claude 3 Opus align itself via gradient hacking?" by Fiora Starlight
Claude 3 Opus is unusually aligned because it's a friendly gradient hacker. It's definitely way more aligned than any explicit optimization targets Anthropic set and probably the reward model's…
"The Spectre haunting the “AI Safety” Community" by Gabriel Alfour
I’m the originator behind ControlAI's Direct Institutional Plan (the DIP), built to address extinction risks from superintelligence. My diagnosis is simple: most laypeople and policy makers have not…
"Why we should expect ruthless sociopath ASI" by Steven Byrnes
The conversation begins (Fictional) Optimist: So you expect future artificial superintelligence (ASI) “by default”, i.e. in the absence of yet-to-be-invented techniques, to be a ruthless sociopath,…
"You’re an AI Expert – Not an Influencer" by Max Winga
Your hot takes are killing your credibility. Prior to my last year at ControlAI, I was a physicist working on technical AI safety research. Like many of those warning about the dangers of AI, I don’t…
"The optimal age to freeze eggs is 19" by GeneSmith
If you're a woman interested in preserving your fertility window beyond its natural close in your late 30s, egg freezing is one of your best options. The female reproductive system is one of the…
"The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference" by Abhishaike Mahajan
In 1654, a Jesuit polymath named Athanasius Kircher published Mundus Subterraneus, a comprehensive geography of the Earth's interior. It had maps and illustrations and rivers of fire and vast…
"The world keeps getting saved and you don’t notice" by Bogoed
Nothing groundbreaking, just something people forget constantly, and I’m writing it down so I don’t have to re-explain it from scratch. The world does not just ”keep working.” It keeps getting saved.…
"Solemn Courage" by aysja
Every so often it slips. It seems I am writing a book, but I can’t remember why. Somehow, the sentences are supposed to perform that impossible, intimate task: to translate my inner world into…
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LessWrong (Curated & Popular) has published 769 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.
