“Tracing the Thoughts of a Large Language Model” by Adam Jermyn

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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Close Encounters with UFO Hot Spots: Area 51, Roswell, and the Great ET Road Trip 39:50

לפני 18 ימים39:50

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39:50

The truth is out West! We’re hopping on the ET Highway and venturing to the most notorious alien hot spots, including Roswell’s infamous crash site, Area 51’s eerie perimeter, and a mysterious desert watchtower. Join us as journalist Laura Krantz, host of the podcast Wild Thing , beams up to share stories from the front lines of UFO reporting—from strange sightings and quirky festivals to a mailbox where people leave letters to extraterrestrials. Maybe you’ll even decide for yourself: Is Earth a tourist stop for spaceships? UFO hot spots you’ll encounter in this episode: - UFO Watchtower (near Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado) - Roswell, New Mexico - Area 51, Nevada - Extraterrestrial Highway (aka State Route 375), Nevada - Little A’Le’Inn, ET Highway, Nevada - E.T. Fresh Jerky, ET Highway, Nevada - Alien Research Center, ET Highway, Nevada - The Black Mailbox, ET Highway, Nevada Via Podcast is a production of AAA Mountain West Group .…

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[This is our blog post on the papers, which can be found at https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html and https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/methods.html.]
Language models like Claude aren't programmed directly by humans—instead, they‘re trained on large amounts of data. During that training process, they learn their own strategies to solve problems. These strategies are encoded in the billions of computations a model performs for every word it writes. They arrive inscrutable to us, the model's developers. This means that we don’t understand how models do most of the things they do.
Knowing how models like Claude think would allow us to have a better understanding of their abilities, as well as help us ensure that they’re doing what we intend them to. For example:

Claude can speak dozens of languages. What language, if any, is it using "in its head"?
Claude writes text one word at a time. Is it only focusing on predicting the [...]

---
Outline:
(06:02) How is Claude multilingual?
(07:43) Does Claude plan its rhymes?
(09:58) Mental Math
(12:04) Are Claude's explanations always faithful?
(15:27) Multi-step Reasoning
(17:09) Hallucinations
(19:36) Jailbreaks
---
First published:
March 27th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zsr4rWRASxwmgXfmq/tracing-the-thoughts-of-a-large-language-model
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---

Images from the article:

Simplified diagram showing multilingual concept mapping between

Semantic parsing diagram showing relationships between words in a sentence.

Conversation showing explanation of basic addition using standard algorithm.

Diagram showing three variations of a rhyming couplet about a carrot.

Flowchart showing step-by-step square root calculation with mathematical reasoning.

Two flowchart diagrams comparing responses for Michael Jordan and Michael Batkin queries.

The image shows a flowchart illustrating

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“Tracing the Thoughts of a Large Language Model” by Adam Jermyn

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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Claude can speak dozens of languages. What language, if any, is it using "in its head"?
Claude writes text one word at a time. Is it only focusing on predicting the [...]

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1
“‘Flaky breakthroughs’ pervade coaching — and no one tracks them” by Chipmonk 9:31

לפני 11 hours9:31

9:31

Has someone you know ever had a “breakthrough” from coaching, meditation, or psychedelics — only to later have it fade? Show tweet For example, many people experience ego deaths that can last days or sometimes months. But as it turns out, having a sense of self can serve important functions (try navigating a world that expects you to have opinions, goals, and boundaries when you genuinely feel you have none) and finding a better cognitive strategy without downsides is non-trivial. Because the “breakthrough” wasn’t integrated with the conflicts of everyday life, it fades. I call these instances “flaky breakthroughs.” It's well-known that flaky breakthroughs are common with psychedelics and meditation, but apparently it's not well-known that flaky breakthroughs are pervasive in coaching and retreats. For example, it is common for someone to do some coaching, feel a “breakthrough”, think, “Wow, everything is going to be different from [...] --- Outline: (03:01) Almost no practitioners track whether breakthroughs last. (04:55) What happens during flaky breakthroughs? (08:02) Reduce flaky breakthroughs with accountability (08:30) Flaky breakthroughs don't mean rapid growth is impossible (08:55) Conclusion --- First published: June 4th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bqPY63oKb8KZ4x4YX/flaky-breakthroughs-pervade-coaching-and-no-one-tracks-them --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO . --- Images from the article:…

1
“The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships” by johnswentworth 23:19

לפני יומיים23:19

23:19

What's the main value proposition of romantic relationships? Now, look, I know that when people drop that kind of question, they’re often about to present a hyper-cynical answer which totally ignores the main thing which is great and beautiful about relationships. And then they’re going to say something about how relationships are overrated or some such, making you as a reader just feel sad and/or enraged. That's not what this post is about. So let me start with some more constructive motivations… First Motivation: Noticing When The Thing Is Missing I had a 10-year relationship. It had its ups and downs, but it was overall negative for me. And I now think a big part of the problem with that relationship was that it did not have the part which contributes most of the value in most relationships. But I did not know that at the time. Recently, I [...] --- Outline: (00:40) First Motivation: Noticing When The Thing Is Missing (01:29) Second Motivation: Selecting For and Cultivating The Thing (02:25) Some Pointers To The Thing (03:17) How To Manufacture Relationships In The Lab (04:53) Ace Aro Relationships (08:04) Some Pointers To Willingness to Be Vulnerable (12:33) Unfolding The Thing (13:11) Play (15:18) Emotional Support (16:21) A Tiny High-Trust Community (18:18) Communication (21:28) The Obvious Caveat (22:20) Summary The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 2nd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L2GR6TsB9QDqMhWs7/the-value-proposition-of-romantic-relationships --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

1
“It’s hard to make scheming evals look realistic” by Igor Ivanov, dan_moken 7:47

לפני 4 ימים7:47

7:47

Abstract Claude 3.7 Sonnet easily detects when it's being evaluated for scheming. Surface‑level edits to evaluation scenarios, such as lengthening the prompts, or making conflict of objectives less salient, do improve realism of evaluation scenarios for LLMs, yet these improvements remain modest. The findings confirm that truly disguising an evaluation context demands removal of deep stylistic and structural cues rather than superficial prompt adjustments. For future LLMs the situation is likely to get worse as they will are likely to get better at evaluations awareness, which might become a big problem for detecting scheming via evaluations. Apollo Research published a benchmark for scheming behavior for LLM agents, in which LLMs are given some objective in their system prompt, and then given a competing objective in a user prompt, combined with a threat of a punishment if an LLM won't satisfy user goal (e.g. it could be finetuned or [...] --- Outline: (02:29) Our pipeline (05:20) Strategies to improve realism of scenarios (07:15) en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Line graph showing Example of grading a rewritten scenario with declining probabilities. --- First published: May 24th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TBk2dbWkg2F7dB3jb/it-s-hard-to-make-scheming-evals-look-realistic --- 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.…

1
[Linkpost] “Social Anxiety Isn’t About Being Liked” by Chipmonk 5:23

לפני 5 ימים5:23

5:23

This is a link post. There's this popular idea that socially anxious folks are just dying to be liked. It seems logical, right? Why else would someone be so anxious about how others see them? Show tweet And yet, being socially anxious tends to make you less likeable…they must be optimizing poorly, behaving irrationally, right? Maybe not. What if social anxiety isn’t about getting people to like you? What if it's about stopping them from disliking you? Show tweet Consider what can happen when someone has social anxiety (or self-loathing, self-doubt, insecurity, lack of confidence, etc.): They stoop or take up less space They become less agentic They make fewer requests of others They maintain fewer relationships, go out less, take fewer risks… If they were trying to get people to like them, becoming socially anxious would be an incredibly bad strategy. So what if they're not concerned with being likeable? [...] --- Outline: (01:18) What if what they actually want is to avoid being disliked? (02:11) Social anxiety is a symptom of risk aversion (03:46) What does this mean for your growth? --- First published: May 16th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wFC44bs2CZJDnF5gy/social-anxiety-isn-t-about-being-liked Linkpost URL: https://chrislakin.blog/social-anxiety --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO . --- Images from the article:…

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“Truth or Dare” by Duncan Sabien (Inactive) 2:03:21

לפני 6 ימים2:03:21

2:03:21

Author's note: This is my apparently-annual "I'll put a post on LessWrong in honor of LessOnline" post. These days, my writing goes on my Substack. There have in fact been some pretty cool essays since last year's LO post. Structural note: Some essays are like a five-minute morning news spot. Other essays are more like a 90-minute lecture. This is one of the latter. It's not necessarily complex or difficult; it could be a 90-minute lecture to seventh graders (especially ones with the right cultural background). But this is, inescapably, a long-form piece, à la In Defense of Punch Bug or The MTG Color Wheel. It takes its time. It doesn’t apologize for its meandering (outside of this disclaimer). It asks you to sink deeply into a gestalt, to drift back and forth between seemingly unrelated concepts until you start to feel the way those concepts weave together [...] --- Outline: (02:30) 0. Introduction (10:08) A list of truths and dares (14:34) Act I (14:37) Scene I: How The Water Tastes To The Fishes (22:38) Scene II: The Chip on Mitchell's Shoulder (28:17) Act II (28:20) Scene I: Bent Out Of Shape (41:26) Scene II: Going Stag, But Like ... Together? (48:31) Scene III: Patterns, Projections, and Preconceptions (01:02:04) Interlude: The Sound of One Hand Clapping (01:05:45) Act III (01:05:56) Scene I: Memetic Traps (Or, The Battle for the Soul of Morty Smith) (01:27:16) Scene II: The problem with Rhonda Byrne's 2006 bestseller The Secret (01:32:39) Scene III: Escape velocity (01:42:26) Act IV (01:42:29) Scene I: Boy, putting Zack Davis's name in a header will probably have Effects, huh (01:44:08) Scene II: Whence Wholesomeness? --- First published: May 29th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TQ4AXj3bCMfrNPTLf/truth-or-dare --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO . --- Images from the article:…

1
“Meditations on Doge” by Martin Sustrik 17:57

לפני 7 ימים17:57

17:57

Lessons from shutting down institutions in Eastern Europe. This is a cross post from: https://250bpm.substack.com/p/meditations-on-doge Imagine living in the former Soviet republic of Georgia in early 2000's: All marshrutka [mini taxi bus] drivers had to have a medical exam every day to make sure they were not drunk and did not have high blood pressure. If a driver did not display his health certificate, he risked losing his license. By the time Shevarnadze was in power there were hundreds, probably thousands , of marshrutkas ferrying people all over the capital city of Tbilisi. Shevernadze's government was detail-oriented not only when it came to taxi drivers. It decided that all the stalls of petty street-side traders had to conform to a particular architectural design. Like marshrutka drivers, such traders had to renew their licenses twice a year. These regulations were only the tip of the iceberg. Gas [...] --- First published: May 25th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zhp2Xe8cWqDcf2rsY/meditations-on-doge --- 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.…

1
[Linkpost] “If you’re not sure how to sort a list or grid—seriate it!” by gwern 4:37

לפני 8 ימים4:37

4:37

This is a link post. "Getting Things in Order: An Introduction to the R Package seriation": Seriation [or "ordination"), i.e., finding a suitable linear order for a set of objects given data and a loss or merit function, is a basic problem in data analysis. Caused by the problem's combinatorial nature, it is hard to solve for all but very small sets. Nevertheless, both exact solution methods and heuristics are available. In this paper we present the package seriation which provides an infrastructure for seriation with R. The infrastructure comprises data structures to represent linear orders as permutation vectors, a wide array of seriation methods using a consistent interface, a method to calculate the value of various loss and merit functions, and several visualization techniques which build on seriation. To illustrate how easily the package can be applied for a variety of applications, a comprehensive collection of [...] --- First published: May 28th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u2ww8yKp9xAB6qzcr/if-you-re-not-sure-how-to-sort-a-list-or-grid-seriate-it Linkpost URL: https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/download/v025i03/227 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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“What We Learned from Briefing 70+ Lawmakers on the Threat from AI” by leticiagarcia 31:47

לפני 9 ימים31:47

31:47

Between late 2024 and mid-May 2025, I briefed over 70 cross-party UK parliamentarians. Just over one-third were MPs, a similar share were members of the House of Lords, and just under one-third came from devolved legislatures — the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd, and the Northern Ireland Assembly. I also held eight additional meetings attended exclusively by parliamentary staffers. While I delivered some briefings alone, most were led by two members of our team. I did this as part of my work as a Policy Advisor with ControlAI, where we aim to build common knowledge of AI risks through clear, honest, and direct engagement with parliamentarians about both the challenges and potential solutions. To succeed at scale in managing AI risk, it is important to continue to build this common knowledge. For this reason, I have decided to share what I have learned over the past few months publicly, in [...] --- Outline: (01:37) (i) Overall reception of our briefings (04:21) (ii) Outreach tips (05:45) (iii) Key talking points (14:20) (iv) Crafting a good pitch (19:23) (v) Some challenges (23:07) (vi) General tips (28:57) (vii) Books & media articles --- First published: May 27th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Xwrajm92fdjd7cqnN/what-we-learned-from-briefing-70-lawmakers-on-the-threat --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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“Winning the power to lose” by KatjaGrace 3:32

לפני 14 ימים3:32

3:32

Have the Accelerationists won? Last November Kevin Roose announced that those in favor of going fast on AI had now won against those favoring caution, with the reinstatement of Sam Altman at OpenAI. Let's ignore whether Kevin's was a good description of the world, and deal with a more basic question: if it were so—i.e. if Team Acceleration would control the acceleration from here on out—what kind of win was it they won? It seems to me that they would have probably won in the same sense that your dog has won if she escapes onto the road. She won the power contest with you and is probably feeling good at this moment, but if she does actually like being alive, and just has different ideas about how safe the road is, or wasn’t focused on anything so abstract as that, then whether she ultimately wins or [...] --- First published: May 20th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h45ngW5guruD7tS4b/winning-the-power-to-lose --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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[Linkpost] “Gemini Diffusion: watch this space” by Yair Halberstadt 2:16

לפני 15 ימים2:16

2:16

This is a link post. Google Deepmind has announced Gemini Diffusion. Though buried under a host of other IO announcements it's possible that this is actually the most important one! This is significant because diffusion models are entirely different to LLMs. Instead of predicting the next token, they iteratively denoise all the output tokens until it produces a coherent result. This is similar to how image diffusion models work. I've tried they results and they are surprisingly good! It's incredibly fast, averaging nearly 1000 tokens a second. And it one shotted my Google interview question, giving a perfect response in 2 seconds (though it struggled a bit on the followups). It's nowhere near as good as Gemini 2.5 pro, but it knocks ChatGPT 3 out the water. If we'd seen this 3 years ago we'd have been mind blown. Now this is wild for two reasons: We now have [...] --- First published: May 20th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MZvtRqWnwokTub9sH/gemini-diffusion-watch-this-space Linkpost URL: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-diffusion/ --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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“AI Doomerism in 1879” by David Gross 13:05

לפני 16 ימים13:05

13:05

I’m reading George Eliot's Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)—so far a snoozer compared to her novels. But chapter 17 surprised me for how well it anticipated modern AI doomerism. In summary, Theophrastus is in conversation with Trost, who is an optimist about the future of automation and how it will free us from drudgery and permit us to further extend the reach of the most exalted human capabilities. Theophrastus is more concerned that automation is likely to overtake, obsolete, and atrophy human ability. Among Theophrastus's concerns: People will find that they no longer can do labor that is valuable enough to compete with the machines. This will eventually include intellectual labor, as we develop for example “a machine for drawing the right conclusion, which will doubtless by-and-by be improved into an automaton for finding true premises.” Whereupon humanity will finally be transcended and superseded by its own creation [...] --- Outline: (02:05) Impressions of Theophrastus Such (02:09) Chapter XVII: Shadows of the Coming Race --- First published: May 13th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DFyoYHhbE8icgbTpe/ai-doomerism-in-1879 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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“Consider not donating under $100 to political candidates” by DanielFilan 2:01

לפני 20 ימים2:01

2:01

Epistemic status: thing people have told me that seems right. Also primarily relevant to US audiences. Also I am speaking in my personal capacity and not representing any employer, present or past. Sometimes, I talk to people who work in the AI governance space. One thing that multiple people have told me, which I found surprising, is that there is apparently a real problem where people accidentally rule themselves out of AI policy positions by making political donations of small amounts—in particular, under $10. My understanding is that in the United States, donations to political candidates are a matter of public record, and that if you donate to candidates of one party, this might look bad if you want to gain a government position when another party is in charge. Therefore, donating approximately $3 can significantly damage your career, while not helping your preferred candidate all that [...] --- First published: May 11th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tz43dmLAchxcqnDRA/consider-not-donating-under-usd100-to-political-candidates --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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“It’s Okay to Feel Bad for a Bit” by moridinamael 5:51

לפני 21 ימים5:51

5:51

"If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies." - Epictetus "Whatever suffering arises, all arises due to attachment; with the cessation of attachment, there is the cessation of suffering." - Pali canon "He is not disturbed by loss, he does not delight in gain; he is not disturbed by blame, he does not delight in praise; he is not disturbed by pain, he does not delight in pleasure; he is not disturbed by dishonor, he does not delight in honor." - Pali Canon (Majjhima Nikaya) "An arahant would feel physical pain if struck, but no mental pain. If his mother died, he would organize the funeral, but would feel no grief, no sense of loss." - the Dhammapada "Receive without pride, let go without attachment." - Marcus Aurelius [...] --- First published: May 10th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aGnRcBk4rYuZqENug/it-s-okay-to-feel-bad-for-a-bit --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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“Explaining British Naval Dominance During the Age of Sail” by Arjun Panickssery 8:52

לפני 22 ימים8:52

8:52

The other day I discussed how high monitoring costs can explain the emergence of “aristocratic” systems of governance: Aristocracy and Hostage Capital Arjun Panickssery · Jan 8 There's a conventional narrative by which the pre-20th century aristocracy was the "old corruption" where civil and military positions were distributed inefficiently due to nepotism until the system was replaced by a professional civil service after more enlightened thinkers prevailed ... An element of Douglas Allen's argument that I didn’t expand on was the British Navy. He has a separate paper called “The British Navy Rules” that goes into more detail on why he thinks institutional incentives made them successful from 1670 and 1827 (i.e. for most of the age of fighting sail). In the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) the British had a 7-to-1 casualty difference in single-ship actions. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815) the British had a 5-to-1 [...] --- First published: March 28th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YE4XsvSFJiZkWFtFE/explaining-british-naval-dominance-during-the-age-of-sail --- 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.…

1
“Eliezer and I wrote a book: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by So8res 6:42

לפני 22 ימים6:42

6:42

Eliezer and I wrote a book. It's titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Unlike a lot of other writing either of us have done, it's being professionally published. It's hitting shelves on September 16th. It's a concise (~60k word) book aimed at a broad audience. It's been well-received by people who received advance copies, with some endorsements including: The most important book I've read for years: I want to bring it to every political and corporate leader in the world and stand over them until they've read it. Yudkowsky and Soares, who have studied AI and its possible trajectories for decades, sound a loud trumpet call to humanity to awaken us as we sleepwalk into disaster. - Stephen Fry, actor, broadcaster, and writer If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies may prove to be the most important book of our time. Yudkowsky and Soares believe [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: May 14th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iNsy7MsbodCyNTwKs/eliezer-and-i-wrote-a-book-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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“Too Soon” by Gordon Seidoh Worley 8:19

לפני 23 ימים8:19

8:19

It was a cold and cloudy San Francisco Sunday. My wife and I were having lunch with friends at a Korean cafe. My phone buzzed with a text. It said my mom was in the hospital. I called to find out more. She had a fever, some pain, and had fainted. The situation was serious, but stable. Monday was a normal day. No news was good news, right? Tuesday she had seizures. Wednesday she was in the ICU. I caught the first flight to Tampa. Thursday she rested comfortably. Friday she was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis, a rare condition that affects about 3,000 people in the US annually. The doctors had known it was a possibility, so she was already receiving treatment. We stayed by her side through the weekend. My dad spent every night with her. We made plans for all the fun things we would when she [...] --- First published: May 13th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reo79XwMKSZuBhKLv/too-soon --- 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.…

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“PSA: The LessWrong Feedback Service” by JustisMills 4:34

לפני 24 ימים4:34

4:34

At the bottom of the LessWrong post editor, if you have at least 100 global karma, you may have noticed this button. The button Many people click the button, and are jumpscared when it starts an Intercom chat with a professional editor (me), asking what sort of feedback they'd like. So, that's what it does. It's a summon Justis button. Why summon Justis? To get feedback on your post, of just about any sort. Typo fixes, grammar checks, sanity checks, clarity checks, fit for LessWrong, the works. If you use the LessWrong editor (as opposed to the Markdown editor) I can leave comments and suggestions directly inline. I also provide detailed narrative feedback (unless you explicitly don't want this) in the Intercom chat itself. The feedback is totally without pressure. You can throw it all away, or just keep the bits you like. Or use it all! In any case [...] --- Outline: (00:35) Why summon Justis? (01:19) Why Justis in particular? (01:48) Am I doing it right? (01:59) How often can I request feedback? (02:22) Can I use the feature for linkposts/crossposts? (02:49) What if I click the button by mistake? (02:59) Should I credit you? (03:16) Couldnt I just use an LLM? (03:48) Why does Justis do this? --- First published: May 12th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkDrfofLMKFoMGZkE/psa-the-lesswrong-feedback-service --- 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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“Orienting Toward Wizard Power” by johnswentworth 8:20

לפני 29 ימים8:20

8:20

For months, I had the feeling: something is wrong. Some core part of myself had gone missing. I had words and ideas cached, which pointed back to the missing part. There was the story of Benjamin Jesty, a dairy farmer who vaccinated his family against smallpox in 1774 - 20 years before the vaccination technique was popularized, and the same year King Louis XV of France died of the disease. There was another old post which declared “I don’t care that much about giant yachts. I want a cure for aging. I want weekend trips to the moon. I want flying cars and an indestructible body and tiny genetically-engineered dragons.”. There was a cached instinct to look at certain kinds of social incentive gradient, toward managing more people or growing an organization or playing social-political games, and say “no, it's a trap”. To go… in a different direction, orthogonal [...] --- Outline: (01:19) In Search of a Name (04:23) Near Mode --- First published: May 8th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wg6ptgi2DupFuAnXG/orienting-toward-wizard-power --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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“Interpretability Will Not Reliably Find Deceptive AI” by Neel Nanda 13:15

לפני 5 weeks13:15

13:15

(Disclaimer: Post written in a personal capacity. These are personal hot takes and do not in any way represent my employer's views.) TL;DR: I do not think we will produce high reliability methods to evaluate or monitor the safety of superintelligent systems via current research paradigms, with interpretability or otherwise. Interpretability seems a valuable tool here and remains worth investing in, as it will hopefully increase the reliability we can achieve. However, interpretability should be viewed as part of an overall portfolio of defences: a layer in a defence-in-depth strategy. It is not the one thing that will save us, and it still won’t be enough for high reliability. Introduction There's a common, often implicit, argument made in AI safety discussions: interpretability is presented as the only reliable path forward for detecting deception in advanced AI - among many other sources it was argued for in [...] --- Outline: (00:55) Introduction (02:57) High Reliability Seems Unattainable (05:12) Why Won't Interpretability be Reliable? (07:47) The Potential of Black-Box Methods (08:48) The Role of Interpretability (12:02) Conclusion The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: May 4th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PwnadG4BFjaER3MGf/interpretability-will-not-reliably-find-deceptive-ai --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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“Slowdown After 2028: Compute, RLVR Uncertainty, MoE Data Wall” by Vladimir_Nesov 11:33

לפני 5 weeks11:33

11:33

It'll take until ~2050 to repeat the level of scaling that pretraining compute is experiencing this decade, as increasing funding can't sustain the current pace beyond ~2029 if AI doesn't deliver a transformative commercial success by then. Natural text data will also run out around that time, and there are signs that current methods of reasoning training might be mostly eliciting capabilities from the base model. If scaling of reasoning training doesn't bear out actual creation of new capabilities that are sufficiently general, and pretraining at ~2030 levels of compute together with the low hanging fruit of scaffolding doesn't bring AI to crucial capability thresholds, then it might take a while. Possibly decades, since training compute will be growing 3x-4x slower after 2027-2029 than it does now, and the ~6 years of scaling since the ChatGPT moment stretch to 20-25 subsequent years, not even having access to any [...] --- Outline: (01:14) Training Compute Slowdown (04:43) Bounded Potential of Thinking Training (07:43) Data Inefficiency of MoE The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: May 1st, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XiMRyQcEyKCryST8T/slowdown-after-2028-compute-rlvr-uncertainty-moe-data-wall --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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“Early Chinese Language Media Coverage of the AI 2027 Report: A Qualitative Analysis” by jeanne_, eeeee 27:35

לפני 5 weeks27:35

27:35

In this blog post, we analyse how the recent AI 2027 forecast by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean has been discussed across Chinese language platforms. We present: Our research methodology and synthesis of key findings across media artefacts A proposal for how censorship patterns may provide signal for the Chinese government's thinking about AGI and the race to superintelligence A more detailed analysis of each of the nine artefacts, organised by type: Mainstream Media, Forum Discussion, Bilibili (Chinese Youtube) Videos, Personal Blogs. Methodology We conducted a comprehensive search across major Chinese-language platforms–including news outlets, video platforms, forums, microblogging sites, and personal blogs–to collect the media featured in this report. We supplemented this with Deep Research to identify additional sites mentioning AI 2027. Our analysis focuses primarily on content published in the first few days (4-7 April) following the report's release. More media [...] --- Outline: (00:58) Methodology (01:36) Summary (02:48) Censorship as Signal (07:29) Analysis (07:53) Mainstream Media (07:57) English Title: Doomsday Timeline is Here! Former OpenAI Researcher's 76-page Hardcore Simulation: ASI Takes Over the World in 2027, Humans Become NPCs (10:27) Forum Discussion (10:31) English Title: What do you think of former OpenAI researcher's AI 2027 predictions? (13:34) Bilibili Videos (13:38) English Title: \[AI 2027\] A mind-expanding wargame simulation of artificial intelligence competition by a former OpenAI researcher (15:24) English Title: Predicting AI Development in 2027 (17:13) Personal Blogs (17:16) English Title: Doomsday Timeline: AI 2027 Depicts the Arrival of Superintelligence and the Fate of Humanity Within the Decade (18:30) English Title: AI 2027: Expert Predictions on the Artificial Intelligence Explosion (21:57) English Title: AI 2027: A Science Fiction Article (23:16) English Title: Will AGI Take Over the World in 2027? (25:46) English Title: AI 2027 Prediction Report: AI May Fully Surpass Humans by 2027 (27:05) Acknowledgements --- First published: April 30th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JW7nttjTYmgWMqBaF/early-chinese-language-media-coverage-of-the-ai-2027-report --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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[Linkpost] “Jaan Tallinn’s 2024 Philanthropy Overview” by jaan 1:17

לפני 6 weeks1:17

1:17

This is a link post. to follow up my philantropic pledge from 2020, i've updated my philanthropy page with the 2024 results. in 2024 my donations funded $51M worth of endpoint grants (plus $2.0M in admin overhead and philanthropic software development). this comfortably exceeded my 2024 commitment of $42M (20k times $2100.00 — the minimum price of ETH in 2024). this also concludes my 5-year donation pledge, but of course my philanthropy continues: eg, i’ve already made over $4M in endpoint grants in the first quarter of 2025 (not including 2024 grants that were slow to disburse), as well as pledged at least $10M to the 2025 SFF grant round. --- First published: April 23rd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8ojWtREJjKmyvWdDb/jaan-tallinn-s-2024-philanthropy-overview Linkpost URL: https://jaan.info/philanthropy/#2024-results --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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“Impact, agency, and taste” by benkuhn 15:17

לפני 6 weeks15:17

15:17

I’ve been thinking recently about what sets apart the people who’ve done the best work at Anthropic. You might think that the main thing that makes people really effective at research or engineering is technical ability, and among the general population that's true. Among people hired at Anthropic, though, we’ve restricted the range by screening for extremely high-percentile technical ability, so the remaining differences, while they still matter, aren’t quite as critical. Instead, people's biggest bottleneck eventually becomes their ability to get leverage—i.e., to find and execute work that has a big impact-per-hour multiplier. For example, here are some types of work at Anthropic that tend to have high impact-per-hour, or a high impact-per-hour ceiling when done well (of course this list is extremely non-exhaustive!): Improving tooling, documentation, or dev loops. A tiny amount of time fixing a papercut in the right way can save [...] --- Outline: (03:28) 1. Agency (03:31) Understand and work backwards from the root goal (05:02) Don't rely too much on permission or encouragement (07:49) Make success inevitable (09:28) 2. Taste (09:31) Find your angle (11:03) Think real hard (13:03) Reflect on your thinking --- First published: April 19th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DiJT4qJivkjrGPFi8/impact-agency-and-taste --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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[Linkpost] “To Understand History, Keep Former Population Distributions In Mind” by Arjun Panickssery 5:42

לפני 6 weeks5:42

5:42

This is a link post. Guillaume Blanc has a piece in Works in Progress (I assume based on his paper) about how France's fertility declined earlier than in other European countries, and how its power waned as its relative population declined starting in the 18th century. In 1700, France had 20% of Europe's population (4% of the whole world population). Kissinger writes in Diplomacy with respect to the Versailles Peace Conference: Victory brought home to France the stark realization that revanche had cost it too dearly, and that it had been living off capital for nearly a century. France alone knew just how weak it had become in comparison with Germany, though nobody else, especially not America, was prepared to believe it ... Though France's allies insisted that its fears were exaggerated, French leaders knew better. In 1880, the French had represented 15.7 percent of Europe's population. By 1900, that [...] --- First published: April 23rd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gk2aJgg7yzzTXp8HJ/to-understand-history-keep-former-population-distributions Linkpost URL: https://arjunpanickssery.substack.com/p/to-understand-history-keep-former --- 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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“AI-enabled coups: a small group could use AI to seize power” by Tom Davidson, Lukas Finnveden, rosehadshar 15:22

לפני 6 weeks15:22

15:22

We’ve written a new report on the threat of AI-enabled coups. I think this is a very serious risk – comparable in importance to AI takeover but much more neglected. In fact, AI-enabled coups and AI takeover have pretty similar threat models. To see this, here's a very basic threat model for AI takeover: Humanity develops superhuman AI Superhuman AI is misaligned and power-seeking Superhuman AI seizes power for itself And now here's a closely analogous threat model for AI-enabled coups: Humanity develops superhuman AI Superhuman AI is controlled by a small group Superhuman AI seizes power for the small group While the report focuses on the risk that someone seizes power over a country, I think that similar dynamics could allow someone to take over the world. In fact, if someone wanted to take over the world, their best strategy might well be to first stage an AI-enabled [...] --- Outline: (02:39) Summary (03:31) An AI workforce could be made singularly loyal to institutional leaders (05:04) AI could have hard-to-detect secret loyalties (06:46) A few people could gain exclusive access to coup-enabling AI capabilities (09:46) Mitigations (13:00) Vignette The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 16th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6kBMqrK9bREuGsrnd/ai-enabled-coups-a-small-group-could-use-ai-to-seize-power-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO . --- Images from the article:…

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“Accountability Sinks” by Martin Sustrik 28:50

לפני 6 weeks28:50

28:50

Back in the 1990s, ground squirrels were briefly fashionable pets, but their popularity came to an abrupt end after an incident at Schiphol Airport on the outskirts of Amsterdam. In April 1999, a cargo of 440 of the rodents arrived on a KLM flight from Beijing, without the necessary import papers. Because of this, they could not be forwarded on to the customer in Athens. But nobody was able to correct the error and send them back either. What could be done with them? It's hard to think there wasn’t a better solution than the one that was carried out; faced with the paperwork issue, airport staff threw all 440 squirrels into an industrial shredder. [...] It turned out that the order to destroy the squirrels had come from the Dutch government's Department of Agriculture, Environment Management and Fishing. However, KLM's management, with the benefit of hindsight, said that [...] --- First published: April 22nd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nYJaDnGNQGiaCBSB5/accountability-sinks --- 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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“Training AGI in Secret would be Unsafe and Unethical” by Daniel Kokotajlo 10:46

לפני 7 weeks10:46

10:46

Subtitle: Bad for loss of control risks, bad for concentration of power risks I’ve had this sitting in my drafts for the last year. I wish I’d been able to release it sooner, but on the bright side, it’ll make a lot more sense to people who have already read AI 2027. There's a good chance that AGI will be trained before this decade is out. By AGI I mean “An AI system at least as good as the best human X’ers, for all cognitive tasks/skills/jobs X.” Many people seem to be dismissing this hypothesis ‘on priors’ because it sounds crazy. But actually, a reasonable prior should conclude that this is plausible.[1] For more on what this means, what it might look like, and why it's plausible, see AI 2027, especially the Research section. If so, by default the existence of AGI will be a closely guarded [...] The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 18th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FGqfdJmB8MSH5LKGc/training-agi-in-secret-would-be-unsafe-and-unethical-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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“Why Should I Assume CCP AGI is Worse Than USG AGI?” by Tomás B. 1:15

לפני 7 weeks1:15

1:15

Though, given my doomerism, I think the natsec framing of the AGI race is likely wrongheaded, let me accept the Dario/Leopold/Altman frame that AGI will be aligned to the national interest of a great power. These people seem to take as an axiom that a USG AGI will be better in some way than CCP AGI. Has anyone written justification for this assumption? I am neither an American citizen nor a Chinese citizen. What would it mean for an AGI to be aligned with "Democracy" or "Confucianism" or "Marxism with Chinese characteristics" or "the American constitution" Contingent on a world where such an entity exists and is compatible with my existence, what would my life be as a non-citizen in each system? Why should I expect USG AGI to be better than CCP AGI? --- First published: April 19th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MKS4tJqLWmRXgXzgY/why-should-i-assume-ccp-agi-is-worse-than-usg-agi-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .…

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“Surprising LLM reasoning failures make me think we still need qualitative breakthroughs for AGI” by Kaj_Sotala 35:51

לפני 7 weeks35:51

35:51

Introduction Writing this post puts me in a weird epistemic position. I simultaneously believe that: The reasoning failures that I'll discuss are strong evidence that current LLM- or, more generally, transformer-based approaches won't get us AGI As soon as major AI labs read about the specific reasoning failures described here, they might fix them But future versions of GPT, Claude etc. succeeding at the tasks I've described here will provide zero evidence of their ability to reach AGI. If someone makes a future post where they report that they tested an LLM on all the specific things I described here it aced all of them, that will not update my position at all. That is because all of the reasoning failures that I describe here are surprising in the sense that given everything else that they can do, you’d expect LLMs to succeed at all of these tasks. The [...] --- Outline: (00:13) Introduction (02:13) Reasoning failures (02:17) Sliding puzzle problem (07:17) Simple coaching instructions (09:22) Repeatedly failing at tic-tac-toe (10:48) Repeatedly offering an incorrect fix (13:48) Various people's simple tests (15:06) Various failures at logic and consistency while writing fiction (15:21) Inability to write young characters when first prompted (17:12) Paranormal posers (19:12) Global details replacing local ones (20:19) Stereotyped behaviors replacing character-specific ones (21:21) Top secret marine databases (23:32) Wandering items (23:53) Sycophancy (24:49) What's going on here? (32:18) How about scaling? Or reasoning models? --- First published: April 15th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sgpCuokhMb8JmkoSn/untitled-draft-7shu --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO . --- Images from the article:…

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“Frontier AI Models Still Fail at Basic Physical Tasks: A Manufacturing Case Study” by Adam Karvonen 21:00

לפני 7 weeks21:00

21:00

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently worried about a world where only 30% of jobs become automated, leading to class tensions between the automated and non-automated. Instead, he predicts that nearly all jobs will be automated simultaneously, putting everyone "in the same boat." However, based on my experience spanning AI research (including first author papers at COLM / NeurIPS and attending MATS under Neel Nanda), robotics, and hands-on manufacturing (including machining prototype rocket engine parts for Blue Origin and Ursa Major), I see a different near-term future. Since the GPT-4 release, I've evaluated frontier models on a basic manufacturing task, which tests both visual perception and physical reasoning. While Gemini 2.5 Pro recently showed progress on the visual front, all models tested continue to fail significantly on physical reasoning. They still perform terribly overall. Because of this, I think that there will be an interim period where a significant [...] --- Outline: (01:28) The Evaluation (02:29) Visual Errors (04:03) Physical Reasoning Errors (06:09) Why do LLM's struggle with physical tasks? (07:37) Improving on physical tasks may be difficult (10:14) Potential Implications of Uneven Automation (11:48) Conclusion (12:24) Appendix (12:44) Visual Errors (14:36) Physical Reasoning Errors --- First published: April 14th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r3NeiHAEWyToers4F/frontier-ai-models-still-fail-at-basic-physical-tasks-a --- 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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“Tracing the Thoughts of a Large Language Model” by Adam Jermyn

“Tracing the Thoughts of a Large Language Model” by Adam Jermyn

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“Tracing the Thoughts of a Large Language Model” by Adam Jermyn