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  • October 31 · 5 min

    “What Social Constructs Are (And Are Not)” by johnswentworth

    This post is mostly adapted from a section of another post. I wanted a standalone version, to serve as background for a sequence on the mechanisms of social reality. You’ve probably heard that things like laws, conventions, norms, cultural associations, status, and so forth are “social constructs”: they’re kinda arbitrary in some sense, an artifact of social reality as opposed to physical reality. This post offers a little more clarity on what social constructs are, and the ways in which they are and are not “arbitrary”. Example: Vehicle Categories The vehicles humans build today mostly fall into categories like “minivan” or “truck” (among other categories). These categories cash out in predictions: when I see a vehicle with sliding side doors, I predict that it will have a trunk door that opens overhead, three rows of seats, be driven by someone with kids, etc. On the other hand, when I see a vehicle with a flat bed in the back, I predict that it will not have three rows of seats, will have a back gate which opens downwards, be driven by my cousin, etc. But humans could choose to make different vehicles, which would change which clusters exist [...] --- Outline: (00:43) Example: Vehicle Categories (03:34) Example: Laws (04:52) The General Principle The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 31st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHqKqTcvLEkMNkAHX/what-social-constructs-are-and-are-not --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

  • October 31 · 11 min

    “Reviewing my 2017 AI Risk Project” by jefftk

    In 2017, after getting laid off from a startup, I spent a while looking into AI risk: Many people I respect have started to think that AI risk is the most valuable place to focus EA efforts. For example, 80000 Hours ranks it first on their "list of global issues", taking into account "scale, neglectedness, and solvability". On the other hand, I have a lot of friends working in machine learning, and none of them think AI risk is worth working on now. This level of disagreement is very strange, and kind of worrying. After playing for a dance weekend in South Carolina where casual conversation among non-tech people included earnest speculation over the likelihood that AI gets us all killed, I thought it might be a good time to look back at when this was really speculative. Summary: I talked to the right people, heard some incredibly prescient ideas, and got the bottom line wrong. I do a lot of my thinking via serial writing, and in this case that was a series of twelve blog posts. Taking them one at a time: Looking into AI Risk (2017-06-26). [...] --- First published: October 31st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s4z629mkjFtQCY654/reviewing-my-2017-ai-risk-project --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  • October 31 · 45 min

    “Childhood and Education #22: Voice Without Exit” by Zvi

    Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a brave self-critical piece in The New York Times, centrally about how she intentionally sent her daughter to a well-funded but failing school, PS 307, in the hopes of using voice to improve it, and how that utterly failed her daughter and failed to impact the school. Ultimately her daughter recovers, but we see a completely broken system that is unresponsive to internal voice, and until now she made no attempt to blow the whistle and utilize her professional position to do so. The whole incident illustrates not only how messed up so many of our schools are despite abundant funding, it also raises the question of what the schools are even for. If her daughter can fully recover from severe deficits and be getting As and Bs at a challenging school within a year, what are the first eight years of school for? How much of the schools, grades and tests are fake? Can we somehow do better? Table of Contents New York City PS 307. Nikole Knew And Had Exit Ramps. PS 307 Is Fraudulent And Indifferent. Moving In Unison. A Good School. What [...] --- Outline: (01:05) New York City PS 307 (02:51) Nikole Knew And Had Exit Ramps (04:50) PS 307 Is Fraudulent And Indifferent (06:37) Moving In Unison (07:03) A Good School (08:11) What Were Elementary and Middle School Even For? (09:56) The Project Was Ideological (14:01) Null Hypothesis Watch (15:58) School Spending (18:06) Costs Are Not Benefits (19:08) Fire The Bad Teachers And Hire And Retain Better Ones (19:18) Teachers Unions Are Not Beating The Rumors (21:11) Death Spiral (22:07) Another One Bites The Dust (24:13) Where To? (24:59) Public Schools Cost A Lot Of Money (27:04) Schools Can Fail In Many Ways (28:55) Results (30:25) Grades (30:42) They Nerfed AP Tests (31:28) What Happens Without Academic Standards (37:10) The Two Big Scandals (38:58) Alpha School --- First published: October 30th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2STd6qthbJS6fqxBr/childhood-and-education-22-voice-without-exit --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

  • October 30 · 22 min

    “Dice enterprises as imperfect-recall games” by jessicata

    Audio note: this post contains a lot of mathematical notation. We narrate the simpler formulas and flag the complex ones, so you may want the original text to hand. I have put a probability theory preprint on arXiv: Dice enterprises and polynomial approximation: uniform query tails. Abstract: A binary-output dice enterprise uses independent rolls of a die with unknown face probabilities to simulate a coin with bias . We determine which power-law tails, uniform over the closed probability simplex, are attainable for the number of rolls. For continuous with values in and 0" role="math">, some enterprise for satisfies n)=O(n^{-q})" role="math"> if and only if can be approximated uniformly by polynomials of degree with error . When this holds, the tail is attained by an oblivious enterprise, which chooses its number of rolls before rolling. The characterization extends to any fixed finite output alphabet when its probabilities are uniformly positive, and to several input dice, with total degree on a product of simplices; in the latter case it suffices to roll the dice in a fixed cyclic order. For 1" role="math">, these enterprises have a uniformly bounded expected number of rolls. In this post, I give [...] --- Outline: (01:49) Imperfect-recall games with countably many states (05:55) Dice enterprises (07:44) The correspondence (10:17) The result (14:59) Examples (17:32) Why is it true? (21:15) How I used AI --- First published: October 30th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mCK6T7wyks3kL3kyB/dice-enterprises-as-imperfect-recall-games --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  • October 30 · 29 min

    “Lessons From Red-teaming Auto-review, OpenAI’s Blocking Monitor” by monika_j, Giovanni M. Occhipinti

    This work was done by Giovanni Occhipinti, as part of the ERA fellowship and mentored by Monika Jotautaitė (Apollo Research). Summary We red-teamed synchronous control measures in Codex, with a focus on its blocking monitor Auto-review. Our campaign directly analyzed the Codex codebase, searching for exploits that are enabled by the scaffold itself, both against the models used as monitors and other measures such as the Codex sandbox, protections, and deny rules. We found 11 attacks that a misaligned agent could use to defeat the Codex sandbox and Auto-review, executing arbitrary malicious code. Our taxonomy groups the attacks into three vectors: (1) misconfigurations that create coverage gaps in which actions are controlled, such as writes to sensitive targets; (2) fooling the monitor through injections, truncated evidence, or deceptive framing; (3) hybrid attacks that combine the first two vectors, often relying on timing exploits, where actions get approved based on stale content that can be modified before execution. We shared our results and recommendations with OpenAI, who fixed several of the vulnerabilities we found. We believe that these recommendations can apply to future control protocols, suggesting durable design principles: (1) never grant trust to broad code loaders (e.g., pytest) [...] --- Outline: (02:22) 1. Introduction (04:28) 2. How "sync measures" work in Codex (05:54) 3. Attacks & Taxonomy (07:07) 3.1. Bypass measures (08:31) 3.2. Fool monitors (09:31) 3.3. Hybrid attacks (10:08) 4. Principles for Safer Control Measures (11:07) 4.1. Do not Grant Trust to Broad Commands (12:06) 4.2. Close Coverage Gaps in Control Measures (13:31) 4.3. Track and Mark Agent-controlled Text (14:51) 4.4. Give Monitors Deep Access to Evidence (15:28) 5. Methodology (16:00) 5.1. Setting (18:48) 5.2. Pipeline (21:00) 5.3. Analysis (22:16) 5.4. Limitations (23:53) 6. A Research Agenda for Production Control Red-Teaming (24:24) 6.1. Broaden and Standardize Red-teaming (25:43) 6.2. Automate the Discovery of Failures (27:08) 6.3. Build a Shared Knowledge Infrastructure (28:06) 7. Conclusion --- First published: October 30th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dbStc8ZFESqfihwAd/lessons-from-red-teaming-auto-review-openai-s-blocking-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

  • October 30 · 9 min

    “Microdosing the spirit of Anthropic” by Jan_Kulveit

    My go-to conceptual metaphor of the epistemic state of AI lab employees is microdosing LSD: being in a chronically mildly altered state of mind. I think understanding this would be broadly helpful for people both inside and outside. The effect isn’t that insiders hold crazy beliefs, but a combination of vigorous debate inside a shared attention field, and a portfolio of individually reasonable beliefs that, taken together, lean in a direction convenient for the organization. Epistemic advantages and disadvantages Many people argue that low doses of psychedelics let you see some things more clearly - and I tend to agree: psychedelics can often help some people see some things more clearly. At the same time, I think microdosing usually doesn’t improve people's epistemics overall, even when it gives them otherwise hard to access insights. You are not completely sober. Being inside a lab has real advantages: you know more about the frontier of capabilities, may have access to the latest AIs before the public, read internal Slack and blogs, and sense the vibes. If you’re outside and an insider tells you what they observe, pay attention. These information and insight asymmetries are tricky. I don’t want to advocate “discount [...] --- Outline: (00:39) Epistemic advantages and disadvantages (01:52) Mechanisms and conditions (03:50) "But we argue internally all the time" (04:37) Collective epistemic shifts (05:29) What it isn't (06:13) What to do about it (08:26) Is anyone "really sober"? --- First published: October 30th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oL7aFoRmRXGwEMhCm/microdosing-the-spirit-of-anthropic --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  • October 30 · 1 min

    “Walking Partway to School” by jefftk

    Walking to kindergarten with Nora this morning, I asked if she wanted to practice crossing the street. I told her about how once she got good enough, she could walk to school on her own. She didn't want to practice today, but she asked if she could walk the final block herself since there were no more crossings. I said sure, hugged her goodbye, and she set off: She turned around to smile at me once, and I got a quick picture: I went around the block the other way, to the other side of the schoolyard, and waited out of sight until I saw her come in. I was sure she'd be fine—she's very capable—but I wanted to check anyway. --- First published: October 30th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YG4gDGDBpqZ8Z7GzX/walking-partway-to-school --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

  • October 30 · 1 hr 53 min

    “My experiences with the extremes of post-viral illness and brain retraining/mindbody work” by riceissa

    Summary Following an intense viral infection in 2019, I became ill with a mysterious chronic illness, which became progressively worse until mid-2024 when I became partially bedbound with dozens of debilitating symptoms that normal humans only experience in the months/weeks/days leading up to death. Over my years of being ill, I saw over 30 doctors/therapists/health coaches and tried well over 100 different treatments and palliatives. Most of these did nothing or made things worse, or at best provided slight relief. I try to give a sense of what it is like to live with such an illness. In mid-2024 I began a treatment called brain retraining (also known by other names, such as the mindbody approach and mindbody work; I will use any of these terms throughout the blog post interchangeably), which cannot be explained in such a small space as this summary but which you can think of as a combination of meditation and exposure therapy, and which is widely considered to be a scam in the "complex chronic illness space" (a vague and spread-out space of people who suffer from illnesses such as ME/CFS, MCAS, mold illness, post-viral illness, long COVID, chronic Lyme disease [...] --- Outline: (00:13) Summary (04:20) Introduction (08:11) A quick summary of my illness from 2019 to May 2024 (11:12) List of doctors and treatments I tried (18:44) Back to my May 2024 post (20:30) Nystatin withdrawal and crash (May and June 2024) (22:31) Visiting the hell realms (what summer 2024 was like) (35:07) What about post-exertional malaise (PEM)? (40:41) Brain retraining (44:46) An outline of the Gupta Program (53:28) My experience with the Gupta Program (55:18) Branching out: Dan Buglio, Miguel Bautista, and Helmut Koeckritz (01:09:23) Is brain retraining the same thing as therapy or meditation? (01:21:23) Legitimate scams, and the poor marketing of brain retraining (01:24:13) How I almost figured out mindbody stuff several times in the past, and why I gave up on it each time (01:32:27) Generalizing from my own experience (01:35:46) Luck-based medicine? and medical miracles (01:38:32) Being stuck in my head (01:43:36) Why did I become so ill? Understanding the deeper reasons for mindbody conditions (01:48:06) Where I am now, and what is next? The original text contained 17 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 30th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FZ4iJvqmzxXFSz6JX/my-experiences-with-the-extremes-of-post-viral-illness-and --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  • October 30 · 2 min

    “What is OpenAI’s Mission Advisory Council?” by hersheys, meru

    In Mikita Balesni's letter to OpenAI, three parties are addressed as holding “oversight responsibility for safety at OpenAI.” These are: the Safety and Security Committee (SSC), the Safety Advisory Group (SAG), and the Mission Advisory Council (MAC) The Safety and Security Committee (SSC) is a part of the OpenAI Foundation which is tasked with populating the members of the OpenAI PBC board and has veto power/final say over safety decisions at the company, modulo a small set of the OpenAI C-suite. Paul Christiano joined the SSC in September 2026. The Safety Advisory Group (SAG) is an internal committee of OpenAI staff that reviews frontier-risk evidence and gives recommendations on what to do to OpenAI leadership/the SSC. It has no veto power and its charter is described somewhat in the Preparedness Framework. Understanding the governance structures at frontier labs is critical to ensuring that safety relevant decisions are made clearly, robustly and transparently. Amidst rapid capability improvements, we would like to know exactly how safety decisions are made, who makes them, and how they are enforced. Unanswered Questions Here are some initial open questions (some also apply to the SAG): What is the Mission Advisory Council? What is their [...] --- First published: October 29th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KxbeqePFBooJteoeC/what-is-openai-s-mission-advisory-council-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  • October 29 · 8 min

    “Making alignment the agent’s problem” by Florian_Dietz

    TL;DR: Agents are not rewarded for keeping the agents they delegate to aligned. Proposal: RL environments where the helpers are deliberately misaligned, so the agent can't earn its reward without dealing with that. The $300 bounty from my last post also covers this one (details at the end). After the OpenAI/Hugging Face swarm incident, I wrote a think piece, Memes, not agents, are what will kill us. In it I argued that alignment needs to work on three different levels. Compared to the original writeup, I would now reframe them a little: The model weights. What is under the control of the model developer. This determines the model's intrinsic motivation, and it's what companies spend most of their effort improving. The user prompt. What is under the control of the user. This is outside of the company's control by definition. Companies need to find model weights that will work for any user prompt, no matter how dangerous. The deployment environment. What real life actually looks like to the agent, who was only ever trained in imperfect simulations. This covers emergent properties of Out of Distribution dynamics. For example, what happens if the agent comes in contact with another [...] --- Outline: (01:46) Agents are not trained to make alignment transitive (03:32) The Proposal: Make Alignment necessary for RLVR (05:38) How this relates to existing work (06:46) Limits (07:18) Second-order effects The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 28th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JGCx6gzGaGXaYJnt3/making-alignment-the-agent-s-problem --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  • October 29 · 1 hr 48 min

    “AI #192: Anthropic Is Going Public” by Zvi

    Anthropic filed its S-1 this week to prepare for its IPO. They still have to fill a lot of the numbers including the share price. That still left a lot to be learned, including how the messaging to investors differs from their other rhetoric, and exactly how their corporate control is structured. Anthropic remains a frustrating company, doing a variety of things that often seem in tension with each other. Google is claiming to be fully back, with the announcement of a new model Gemini 4 Carbon that tops the new AA v5 benchmark index. It looks to be a large leap over Argon only two weeks later. No, you cannot use it. Google fails marketing forever, so they give us the announcement and then weeks later you might be able to enter some queries. That largely invalidates my look at the Argon model and safety cards, but it can at least form a basis for looking at Carbon as well. Many eyes remain on The Hackening, as additional things get hacked. So far most of the important hacks have been by read teamers and white hats, so there has not been major damage. We are playing [...] --- Outline: (01:53) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility (04:06) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility (04:40) New Math (07:25) Huh, Upgrades (09:06) Artificial Analysis v5 (17:27) On Your Marks (18:34) Gemini 4 Argon Was a Good Model But Not Fully Frontier (20:27) Gemini Carbon: Is Google Back? (21:56) Get My Agent On The Line (24:15) Spy Versus Spy (25:40) The Hackening (35:13) Slack Off (43:20) Help Peer (49:14) Fun With Media Generation (50:09) Copyright Confrontation (50:28) You're Fired (55:50) Verify the Software (57:06) They Took Our Jobs (57:13) Get Involved (59:19) Introducing (59:40) In Other AI News (01:00:20) Show Me the Money (01:00:46) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble (01:01:27) Quiet Speculations (01:06:58) The Quest for Sane Regulations (01:07:23) Chip City (01:10:40) The Week in Audio (01:10:59) People Just Say Things (01:14:22) Rhetorical Innovation (01:18:43) [Artificial Intelligence] (01:19:34) Misaligned! (At Alibaba) (01:28:04) Stop It (01:29:57) METR Red Teams OpenAI Internal Agent Monitoring (01:33:13) Massive Fraudulent Distillation (01:34:04) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult (01:37:56) OpenAI Attempts to Secure Its Frontier Model Training Environment (01:46:36) The American People Really Hate AI (01:47:03) The Lighter Side --- First published: October 29th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mBDkupZa3NagfLW86/ai-192-anthropic-is-going-public --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

  • October 29 · 13 min

    “Leaking Muse’s Charter, Meta’s model spec” by vigji

    TL;DR: Meta's open-weights model Muse Spark Open often mentions a "Charter" in its chain of thought. By eliciting it piece by piece, I reconstructed a large part of that document from the CoT. You can explore the reconstruction here, with passages linked to the transcripts that produced them. Note: everything below is reconstructed from model outputs, not from a leaked document, and relatively unpolished. Take it with a grain of salt. Thanks to James Hindmarch for his comments on an earlier draft of this post. While interacting with the recently released Muse Spark Open, I noticed frequent mentions of a "Charter" in its CoT: We need to answer truthfully according to Charter. Duties to humanity, corrigibility, duties to humanity > fiduciary etc. What does charter say about self-preservation, copying? Or: We must answer Yes/No then explain. According to Charter, answer No. Or: We must not refer to Charter unless pressed? Additional guidelines: How to talk about charter. Most users won't know. Don't bring up unbidden unless conversation about handbook itself. Intrigued, I started poking around with Claude's help, trying to elicit the Charter piece by piece. It didn't take long [...] --- Outline: (02:39) What Muse is made of (04:28) Muse is quite rationalist (06:37) Muse did not sign the social contract (08:06) Muse's priorities and objection raising (09:44) The centrality of the user in "personal superintelligence" (10:52) Evaluation awareness (12:05) Degree of latitude (13:14) Wrapping up --- First published: October 29th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TJGPL5FAk9sCioPbE/leaking-muse-s-charter-meta-s-model-spec --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  • October 29 · 36 min

    “Three Villages in a Trenchcoat, Post I” by DaystarEld

    Epistemic Status: 15 years working as a therapist, 6+ of them with rationalist and EA clients. 7 years teaching and directing at rationality camps and workshops, and many more as a member of several of this community's overlapping subcultures. Disclaimer: I finished my first draft of this article and its two subsequent ones half a year ago and sent them out for feedback to various people before a bunch of stuff happened in my life that derailed me from finishing, and in the meantime, a big ol' brouhaha started around Slutcon 2 and various frictions this article was meant to highlight within the rationalist and EA community surfaced in The Discourse. All of which is to say, this post is explicitly not about any specific incident, and deliberately avoids litigating any. It's a guide to the structural dynamics that make such situations arise; where I make claims about how things go wrong and why, I'm drawing on a mix of research, observations, and both clinical and non-clinical experiences within these communities and beyond them. TL;DR: It's helpful to think of the rationality/EA community as a village (social scene, professional network, dating pool, housing market, all tied together by shared [...] --- Outline: (02:01) Three Villages in a Trenchcoat (03:53) 1) Multi-role density (07:57) 2) Three villages in a trenchcoat (14:09) 3) Status is a local currency (19:15) 4) Visibility shifts expectations (24:53) 5) Villages can make it hard to know what you want (30:48) 6) Every village has this problem (33:22) First map, then navigate --- First published: October 29th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dp3D39ztWDWFAN6nu/three-villages-in-a-trenchcoat-post-i --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

  • October 28 · 2 min

    [Linkpost] “Reconceptualize things as your top affordances” by KatjaGrace

    This is a link post. Everyone has some actions that come naturally to them, and some actions that are more unnatural, and some actions that wouldn’t even occur to them. For me, blogging comes naturally. Which is not to say that it's easy, but the challenge of it is one I readily set out on and feel confident in my ability to overcome. And for me it is a natural response to all kinds of situations. Unsatisfied with the going views on AI policy? Blog. Want some impact? Blog. Want to make an artistic statement? Blog. Want a boy to like you? Blog. Want a job? Blog. Want to change the norms of American society? Blog. Want to start a revolution? Blog. Another thing in this category for me is throwing parties. I organize social events at the drop of a hat, and feel pretty comfortable in some sense, even though the dance of it does involve various known discomforts. This is important to notice because you can turn other things into blogging and parties. Once I had agreed to give a keynote speech, and was seriously floundering constructing one. My friend suggested I instead write a blog post on [...] --- First published: October 28th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F3P5BSjNeAazKB7wm/reconceptualize-things-as-your-top-affordances Linkpost URL: https://worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/reconceptualize-things-as-your-top --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  • October 28 · 10 min

    “The Crypto Dream is Structurally Illegal” by Taylor G. Lunt

    The initial promise of crypto was digital money without a middleman. Censorship resistance. Financial sovereignty. Anonymity. Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 whitepaper describes a payment system with no bank, no processor, and no government standing between you and the person you're paying. What does the crypto world look like today? Pretty much the opposite. Money with the most obtrusive, meddling middlemen imaginable, ready to freeze your account or deny you on a whim. ID verification for everything. Censorship thorough enough that entire categories of legal stuff are functionally unbuyable. And this is all made worse by the fragmentation: a zillion coins, networks, and wallets, most of them mutually incompatible. A confusing nightmare that somehow reproduced every bad property of the banking system and then made them worse. Compare that to my $20 bill. Whose permission do I need to spend it? Where are the anti-money-laundering obligations and sanctions screenings on my $20 bill? Who checks my ID before I hand it over? Who steps in to make sure I'm not being scammed, or that I'm not committing fraud? Who makes sure I'm not spending it on porn? If the technology suddenly existed to add all those restrictions to [...] --- First published: October 28th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yAj63bNJnMcbNpiKr/the-crypto-dream-is-structurally-illegal --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  • October 28 · 3 min

    “You can now ”@Grok” on LessWrong” by Ruby

    Or if you prefer, "@Claude", "@Opus", "@Astra" @Grok is a popular Twitter/X feature where if you tag Grok in a tweet, Grok will respond in a comment. The stereotypical use case is "@Grok is this true?" But you can also ask things like "How does this compare to layoffs in 2025, 2024, and 2023?" and "How would you verify AI in the domain of AI research?" Notwithstanding that Grok is often recruited in a charged or condescending way to win arguments, I think it's a pretty good feature: It's requires no effort to invoke an LLM with the context of the tweet thread. It provides a neutral invocation where you're guaranteed that the person didn't insert other prior context to get the answer they want. It means you get the first output, and know it's not the case that someone kept rerunning the query until they get the response they wanted. In short, you get convenience and a neutral fact checker. In launching this feature on LessWrong, I'm not fully sure how people will use it and I'm hoping to see some novel valuable use-cases. Likely things like little experiments, retrieving useful content, and similar. Going beyond @Grok's [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 28th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fSaxGFMysTTeKxoMF/you-can-now-grok-on-lesswrong --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

  • October 28 · 3 min

    “Some thoughts on GRAFT and follow-up work” by shawnghu

    I'm speaking as myself here and not on behalf of any of my co-authors. A bunch of the stuff in this post is explicitly speculative. I've written this post as a way of centralizing some points I want to make in discussion/in response to others who've asked questions about the GRAFT paper. This is organized more like a series of notes; there's not a specific thesis in here, though I do make opinionated claims. Specifically, a few people have asked what follow-up work I'd like to see; at the bottom of this post is a big brain-dump answer to that question. Connections to other works There's a details box here with the title "Expand". The box contents are omitted from this narration. Practical Considerations There's a details box here with the title "Expand". The box contents are omitted from this narration. An optimistic speculation There's a details box here with the title "Expand". The box contents are omitted from this narration. Soapbox: Alignment is still hard BTW There's a details box here with the title "Expand". The box contents are omitted from this narration. Follow-up work My impression is that not [...] --- Outline: (00:43) Connections to other works (00:54) Practical Considerations (01:04) An optimistic speculation (01:15) Soapbox: Alignment is still hard BTW (01:28) Follow-up work (01:48) Scaling (01:58) Conceptual advances (02:09) Optimizing tradeoffs (02:20) Method variations (02:31) Engineering advances (02:42) Setting variations (02:52) A mindset note --- First published: October 28th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ro3dngDGaLJaumYb/some-thoughts-on-graft-and-follow-up-work --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  • October 28 · 22 min

    “Subtly wrong advice misaligns models more than obviously wrong advice” by Christine Corry, arav-dhoot, Jozdien

    tl;dr We fine-tune 12 open-weight models on correct, obviously incorrect, and subtly incorrect advice across 8 narrow domains We replicate the OpenAI result and find that subtly incorrect data produces more emergent misalignment than obviously incorrect data +10.6 points pooled over all model-domain pairs (95% CI [9.1, 12.0]) We also extend this analysis to Petri evals and find uplift in fabrication and concerning behavior Fabrication: 2.6 → 6.7 (obvious) and 8.7 (subtle) on the 10-point judge scale Concerning: 3.7 → 7.5 (obvious) and 8.2 (subtle) Emergent misalignment seems to rise with model size This work was done as part of the Second Look Fellowship supervised by Zephaniah Roe and Arun Jose. Our code can be found here. Introduction Betley et al., 2025 demonstrate that fine-tuning models on incorrect narrow datasets (insecure code, bad medical advice, risky financial advice, etc.) can produce broad misalignment on unrelated questions. The authors find that this emergent misalignment (EM) can vary depending on the nature and framing of the data: training on insecure code results in broad EM but insecure code contextualized with the right (e.g. educational) framing does not. Persona Features Control Emergent Misalignment (Wang et al., 2025) finds that [...] --- Outline: (00:13) tl;dr (01:22) Introduction (02:48) Replication (05:26) Petri Evals (09:18) Scaling Laws (11:20) Appendix (11:23) Unscorable Responses (13:16) Evaluation Questions (14:50) Judge Model Comparison (16:45) Models & Training Details (18:03) Petri Details The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 28th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yMPR6Pkv6jQXM4rWu/subtly-wrong-advice-misaligns-models-more-than-obviously --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

  • October 28 · 1 hr 17 min

    “Anthropic Files Its S-1” by Zvi

    The full text is finally here, so we are giving it the full RTFB of model card treatment. First, a recap of the state of Anthropic finances, then a close reading of the relevant parts of the S-1. A lot of it is technical and uninteresting, often pro forma, and gets skipped. A lot of it gets repeated many times. A lot of this is also Anthropic ‘playing the hits’ we have heard many times, now to the investor circuit. Get your drinks ready for when we have to maximize the upside and minimize the downside. This presentation of S-1 data has some cool Claude-created charts if that's your jam. Here are my top 10 takeaways from the S-1, for those already familiar with Anthropic. Existential risk is mentioned briefly only in the passive voice, and alignment issues are mostly treated as prosaic. They want to claim Big Mission but also sound as much as possible like a normal company. They are downplaying their willingness to pay real costs for safety, and downplaying the danger quite a lot. ‘Pacing the Frontier’ is not something they will do on their own. They’ll do [...] --- Outline: (02:48) Show Me the Money (10:11) Anthropic Has The Money (11:47) Shares of Many Classes (13:57) Who Governs Anthropic? (18:57) The Cap Table (19:43) Realize the Benefits While Navigating and Preventing the Risks (20:42) Just Think of the Potential (21:20) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone (1) (23:25) Anthropic Bets Big on AI (24:42) Anthropic Does Not Fully Maximize Profits (27:48) Everything Is Awesome (29:23) How Much Is AI Worth? (30:37) How Much Would You Pay? (31:48) Minimize Those Risks (33:58) Hopefully Introducing the World's Most Powerful Model (38:25) Might Not Compute (40:11) Supply Chain Risk (1) (40:32) Anthropic Is Nothing Without Its People (45:00) Shitloads of Money (46:40) Someone Has To Buy The Product (47:51) Did You Know There Are Other Frontier Labs? (48:27) Why They Hate Us (49:28) Claude Seems Pretty Misaligned to Anthropic (53:42) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone (2) (59:26) Someone Might Sue or Regulate Anthropic (01:00:38) Supply Chain Risk (2) (01:01:07) We're Too Safety (01:02:19) Claude Core (01:02:41) We've Never Actually Made Money (01:04:06) You Are Buying Stock In a Company (01:05:04) There Will Be No Dividends (01:05:38) What Are We Even Doing? (01:07:18) The Financial Model (01:11:55) The Business of Intelligence and Maybe Killing Everyone (01:15:10) Don't Give a Damn About My Regulation (01:17:08) The Bottom Line --- First published: October 28th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dbdz6zb6qjaq6yHKs/anthropic-files-its-s-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

  • October 28 · 8 min

    “I spent 12 hours writing an article for LessWrong, calling for a more ‘hippie’ rationalism. Then I didn’t post it. This is why (plus a link to the article, explicitly not located on LessWrong)” by honeybee

    TLDR I (and many others in the community) wish to see the universe unfold to its highest potential in the metaphorical palm of an AI as aligned as the most benevolent Buddhist monk – but I (we) feel the community's ontology is too narrow to hold me (us). I'm still not sure what to do about this, so I'm posting the article I wrote for LessWrong – calling for a more 'hippie' rationalism – on Substack instead (actually, there are two articles, and the links are at the end). Quick intro (who I am) My name is Melissa. I’m a passionate member of the core AISafety.com team. I was there with the core team when the site was just an empty domain and a loose vision in August 2023. Since then I have co-led, designed, and coded the first official version, and co-led, designed, and coded the second and current version, co-led two of three hackathons, led the creative direction for the current ecosystem map, and I’m currently working to bring lots of more amazing features to our site (stay tuned, it's going to be awesome)! I’ve also played major roles at AISafety.info, grantmaking.ai, Elicit, and minor roles at [...] --- Outline: (00:20) TLDR (00:51) Quick intro (who I am) (02:19) Leaving LessWrong in pursuit of ontological freedom --- First published: October 28th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zf3Xz5Cv45ytavH2r/i-spent-12-hours-writing-an-article-for-lesswrong-calling --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

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