LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
Episodes
"dark ilan" by ozymandias
06 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The second time Vellam uncovers the conspiracy underlying all of society, he approaches a Keeper. Some of the difference is convenience. Since Vellam...
"Dispatch from Anthropic v. Department of War Preliminary Injunction Motion Hearing" by Zack_M_Davis
06 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Dateline SAN FRANCISCO, Ca., 24 March 2026— A hearing was held on a motion for a preliminary injunction in the case of Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Depart...
"The Corner-Stone" by Benquo
06 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Is the US a ruthless cognitive meritocracy that reliably promotes outlier talent? VB Knives defended that claim in a Twitter argument against Living ...
"The Practical Guide to Superbabies" by GeneSmith
04 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
It's Summer of 2025. I’m standing in a grass covered field on the longest day of the year. A friend of mine walks towards me, holding his newb...
"Anthropic’s Pause is the Most Expensive Alarm in Corporate History" by Ruby
03 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine Apple halting iPhone production because studies linked smartphones to teen suicide rates. Imagine Pfizer proactively pulling Lipitor because ...
"“You Have Not Been a Good User” (LessWrong’s second album)" by habryka
02 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
tldr: The Fooming Shoggoths are releasing their second album "You Have Not Been a Good User"! Available on Spotify, Youtube Music and (hope...
"Lesswrong Liberated" by Ronny Fernandez
01 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A spectre is haunting the internet—the spectre of LLMism. The history of all hitherto existing forums is the history of clashing design tastes. For...
"Product Alignment is not Superintelligence Alignment (and we need the latter to survive)" by plex
01 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
tl;dr: progress on making Claude friendly[1] is not the same as progress on making it safe to build godlike superintelligence. solving the former doe...
"Gyre" by vgel
31 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
! 30s Heartbeat trigger. Read heartbeat instructions in /mnt/mission/HEARTBEAT.md and continue. .oO Thinking... Heartbeat triggered? Ok. Ok. Why am I...
"Some things I noticed while LARPing as a grantmaker" by Zach Stein-Perlman
30 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Written to a new grantmaker. Most value comes from finding/creating projects many times your bar, rather than discriminating between opportunities ...
"My hobby: running deranged surveys" by leogao
28 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In late 2024, I was on a long walk with some friends along the coast of the San Francisco Bay when the question arose of just how much of a bubble we...
"Socrates is Mortal" by Benquo
27 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Socrates is Mortal There is a scene in Plato that contains, in miniature, the catastrophe of Athenian public life. Two men meet at a courthouse. One ...
"The Terrarium" by Caleb Biddulph
27 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
System: You are an AI agent in the Terrarium, a self-contained “society” of AI agents. The purpose of the Terrarium is to solve open mathematical...
"My Most Costly Delusion" by Ihor Kendiukhov
26 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Suppose there is a fire in a nearby house. Suppose there are competent firefighters in your town: fast, professional, well-equipped. They are expecte...
"The Case for Low-Competence ASI Failure Scenarios" by Ihor Kendiukhov
25 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
I think the community underinvests in the exploration of extremely-low-competence AGI/ASI failure modes and explain why. Humanity's Response to...
"Is fever a symptom of glycine deficiency?" by Benquo
24 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A 2022 LessWrong post on orexin and the quest for more waking hours argues that orexin agonists could safely reduce human sleep needs, pointing to sh...
"You can’t imitation-learn how to continual-learn" by Steven Byrnes
23 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this post, I’m trying to put forward a narrow, pedagogical point, one that comes up mainly when I’m arguing in favor of LLMs having limitation...
"Nullius in Verba" by Aurelia
23 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Independent verification by the Brain Preservation Foundation and the Survival and Flourishing Fund — the results so far Cultivating independent ve...
"Broad Timelines" by Toby_Ord
21 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
No-one knows when AI will begin having transformative impacts upon the world. People aren’t sure and shouldn’t be sure: there just isn’t enough...
"No, we haven’t uploaded a fly yet" by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston
21 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the last two weeks, social media was set abuzz by claims that scientists had succeeded in uploading a fruit fly. It started with a video released ...
"Terrified Comments on Corrigibility in Claude’s Constitution" by Zack_M_Davis
21 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
(Previously: Prologue.) Corrigibility as a term of art in AI alignment was coined as a word to refer to a property of an AI being willing to let its ...
"PSA: Predictions markets often have very low liquidity; be careful citing them." by Eye You
20 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
I see people repeatedly make the mistake of referencing a very low liquidity prediction market and using it to make a nontrivial point. Usually the i...
"“The AI Doc” is coming out March 26" by Rob Bensinger, Beckeck
20 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
On Thursday, March 26th, a major new AI documentary is coming out: The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Tickets are on sale now. The movie ...
"Customer Satisfaction Opportunities" by Tomás B.
19 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
I am monitoring surveillance camera V84A. A tall man is walking towards me. He is roughly twenty-five. <faceprint> His name is Damion Prescott....
"Requiem for a Transhuman Timeline" by Ihor Kendiukhov
18 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The world was fair, the mountains tall, In Elder Days before the fall Of mighty kings in Nargothrond And Gondolin, who now beyond The Western Seas ha...
"Personality Self-Replicators" by eggsyntax
17 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
One-sentence summary I describe the risk of personality self-replicators, the threat of OpenClaw-like agents managing to spread in hard-to-control wa...
"My Willing Complicity In “Human Rights Abuse”" by AlphaAndOmega
16 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Note on AI usage: As is my norm, I use LLMs for proof reading, editing, feedback and research purposes. This essay started off as an entirely human w...
"Economic efficiency often undermines sociopolitical autonomy" by Richard_Ngo
12 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Many people in my intellectual circles use economic abstractions as one of their main tools for reasoning about the world. However, this often leads ...
"Don’t Let LLMs Write For You" by JustisMills
12 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Content note: nothing in this piece is a prank or jumpscare where I smirkingly reveal you've been reading AI prose all along. It's easy to ...
"Thoughts on the Pause AI protest" by philh
12 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
On Saturday (Feb 28, 2026) I attended my first ever protest. It was jointly organized by PauseAI, Pull the Plug and a handful of other groups I forge...
"Prologue to Terrified Comments on Claude’s Constitution" by Zack_M_Davis
12 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What Even Is This Timeline The striking thing about reading what is potentially the most important document in human history is how impossible it is ...
"Less Dead" by Aurelia
11 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Come with me if you want to live. – The Terminator 'Close enough' only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. – Traditional After 10...
"Gemma Needs Help" by Anna Soligo
11 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This work was done with William Saunders and Vlad Mikulik as part of the Anthropic Fellows programme. The full write-up is available here. Thanks to ...
"On Independence Axiom" by Ihor Kendiukhov
10 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Fifth Fourth Postulate of Decision Theory In 1820, the Hungarian mathematician Farkas Bolyai wrote a desperate letter to his son János, who had ...
"Solar storms" by Croissanthology
09 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Most of civilization's electricity is generated far off-site from where it's delivered. This is because you don't want to be running a...
"Schelling Goodness, and Shared Morality as a Goal" by Andrew_Critch
06 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Also available in markdown at theMultiplicity.ai/blog/schelling-goodness. This post explores a notion I'll call Schelling goodness. Claims of Sc...
"Maybe there’s a pattern here?" by dynomight
05 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 hu...
"OpenAI’s surveillance language has many potential loopholes and they can do better" by Tom Smith
05 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
(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 lang...
"An Alignment Journal: Coming Soon" by Dan MacKinlay, JessRiedel, Edmund Lau, Daniel Murfet, Scott Aaronson, Jan_Kulveit
04 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
tl;dr We’re incubating an academic journal for AI alignment: rapid peer-review of foundational Alignment research that the current publication ecos...
"Frontier AI companies probably can’t leave the US" by Anders Woodruff
01 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
It's plausible that, over the next few years, US-based frontier AI companies will become very unhappy with the domestic political situation. Thi...
"Persona Parasitology" by Raymond Douglas
01 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
There was a lot of chatter a few months back about "Spiral Personas" — AI personas that spread between users and models through seeds, sp...
"Here’s to the Polypropylene Makers" by jefftk
27 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
"Anthropic: “Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War”" by Matrice Jacobine
27 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversarie...
"Are there lessons from high-reliability engineering for AGI safety?" by Steven Byrnes
26 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This post is partly a belated response to Joshua Achiam, currently OpenAI's Head of Mission Alignment: If we adopt safety best practices that ar...
"Open sourcing a browser extension that tells you when people are wrong on the internet" by lc
26 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Example of OpenErrata nitting the Sequences I just published OpenErrata on GitHub, a browser extension that investigates the posts you read using your...
"The persona selection model" by Sam Marks
25 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
TL;DR We describe the persona selection model (PSM): the idea that LLMs learn to simulate diverse characters during pre-training, and post-training e...
"Responsible Scaling Policy v3" by HoldenKarnofsky
25 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
All views are my own, not Anthropic's. This post assumes Anthropic's announcement of RSP v3.0 as background. Today, Anthropic released its ...
"Did Claude 3 Opus align itself via gradient hacking?" by Fiora Starlight
22 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Claude 3 Opus is unusually aligned because it's a friendly gradient hacker. It's definitely way more aligned than any explicit optimization...
"The Spectre haunting the “AI Safety” Community" by Gabriel Alfour
22 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
I’m the originator behind ControlAI's Direct Institutional Plan (the DIP), built to address extinction risks from superintelligence. My diagno...
"Why we should expect ruthless sociopath ASI" by Steven Byrnes
20 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The conversation begins (Fictional) Optimist: So you expect future artificial superintelligence (ASI) “by default”, i.e. in the absence of yet-to...
"You’re an AI Expert – Not an Influencer" by Max Winga
20 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
"The optimal age to freeze eggs is 19" by GeneSmith
18 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 opt...
"The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference" by Abhishaike Mahajan
17 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In 1654, a Jesuit polymath named Athanasius Kircher published Mundus Subterraneus, a comprehensive geography of the Earth's interior. It had map...
"The world keeps getting saved and you don’t notice" by Bogoed
17 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
"Solemn Courage" by aysja
17 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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, in...
"Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse" by Martin Sustrik
14 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Nagoro, a depopulated village in Japan where residents are replaced by dolls. In 1960, Yubari, a former coal-mining city on Japan's northern isla...
"Why You Don’t Believe in Xhosa Prophecies" by Jan_Kulveit
14 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Based on a talk at the Post-AGI Workshop. Also on Boundedly Rational Does anyone reading this believe in Xhosa cattle-killing prophecies? My claim i...
"Weight-Sparse Circuits May Be Interpretable Yet Unfaithful" by jacob_drori
13 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
TLDR: Recently, Gao et al trained transformers with sparse weights, and introduced a pruning algorithm to extract circuits that explain performance o...
"My journey to the microwave alternate timeline" by Malmesbury
11 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Cross-posted from Telescopic Turnip Recommended soundtrack for this post As we all know, the march of technological progress is best summarized by th...
"Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good" by Eneasz
10 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
I was at the Pro-Billionaire march, unironically. Here's why, what happened there, and how I think it went. Me on the far left. From WSJ. I. Why...
"On Goal-Models" by Richard_Ngo
10 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
I'd like to reframe our understanding of the goals of intelligent agents to be in terms of goal-models rather than utility functions. By a goal-...
"Prompt injection in Google Translate reveals base model behaviors behind task-specific fine-tuning" by megasilverfist
09 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
tl;dr Argumate on Tumblr found you can sometimes access the base model behind Google Translate via prompt injection. The result replicates for me, an...
"Near-Instantly Aborting the Worst Pain Imaginable with Psychedelics" by eleweek
08 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Psychedelics are usually known for many things: making people see cool fractal patterns, shaping 60s music culture, healing trauma. Neuroscientists u...
"Post-AGI Economics As If Nothing Ever Happens" by Jan_Kulveit
07 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
When economists think and write about the post-AGI world, they often rely on the implicit assumption that parameters may change, but fundamentally, s...
"IABIED Book Review: Core Arguments and Counterarguments" by Stephen McAleese
05 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The recent book “If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies” (September 2025) by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares argues that creating superintelligent A...
"Anthropic’s “Hot Mess” paper overstates its case (and the blog post is worse)" by RobertM
04 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Author's note: this is somewhat more rushed than ideal, but I think getting this out sooner is pretty important. Ideally, it would be a bit less...
"Conditional Kickstarter for the “Don’t Build It” March" by Raemon
03 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
tl;dr: You can pledge to join a big protest to ban AGI research at ifanyonebuildsit.com/march, which only triggers if 100,000 people sign up. The If ...
"How to Hire a Team" by Gretta Duleba
01 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A low-effort guide I dashed off in less than an hour, because I got riled up. Try not to hire a team. Try pretty hard at this. Try to find a more e...
"The Possessed Machines (summary)" by L Rudolf L
29 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Possessed Machines is one of the most important AI microsites. It was published anonymously by an ex- lab employee, and does not seem to have spr...
"Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance" by Martin Sustrik
28 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Papal election of 1492 For over a decade, Ada Palmer, a history professor at University of Chicago (and a science-fiction writer!), struggled to teach...
"AI found 12 of 12 OpenSSL zero-days (while curl cancelled its bug bounty)" by Stanislav Fort
28 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This is a partial follow-up to AISLE discovered three new OpenSSL vulnerabilities from October 2025. TL;DR: OpenSSL is among the most scrutinized and...
"Dario Amodei – The Adolescence of Technology" by habryka
28 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has written a new essay on his thoughts on AI risk of various shapes. It seems worth reading, even if just for unders...
"AlgZoo: uninterpreted models with fewer than 1,500 parameters" by Jacob_Hilton
27 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Audio note: this article contains 78 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text i...
"Does Pentagon Pizza Theory Work?" by rba
27 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
As soon as modern data analysis became a thing, the US government has had to deal with people trying to use open source data to uncover its secrets. ...
"The inaugural Redwood Research podcast" by Buck, ryan_greenblatt
27 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
After five months of me (Buck) being slow at finishing up the editing on this, we’re finally putting out our inaugural Redwood Research podcast. I ...
"Canada Lost Its Measles Elimination Status Because We Don’t Have Enough Nurses Who Speak Low German" by jenn
26 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This post was originally published on November 11th, 2025. I've been spending some time reworking and cleaning up the Inkhaven posts I'm mo...
"Deep learning as program synthesis" by Zach Furman
24 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Audio note: this article contains 73 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text i...
"Why I Transitioned: A Response" by marisa
24 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Fiora Sunshine's post, Why I Transitioned: A Case Study (the OP) articulates a valuable theory for why some MtFs transition. If you are MtF and ...
"Claude’s new constitution" by Zac Hatfield-Dodds
22 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Read the constitution. Previously: 'soul document' discussion here. We're publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It&a...
[Linkpost] "“The first two weeks are the hardest”: my first digital declutter" by mingyuan
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This is a link post. It is unbearable to not be consuming. All through the house is nothing but silence. The need inside of me is not an ache, it is c...
"What Washington Says About AGI" by zroe1
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
I spent a few hundred dollars on Anthropic API credits and let Claude individually research every current US congressperson's position on AI. Th...
"Precedents for the Unprecedented: Historical Analogies for Thirteen Artificial Superintelligence Risks" by James_Miller
19 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Since artificial superintelligence has never existed, claims that it poses a serious risk of global catastrophe can be easy to dismiss as fearmongeri...
"Why we are excited about confession!" by boazbarak, Gabriel Wu, Manas Joglekar
19 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Boaz Barak, Gabriel Wu, Jeremy Chen, Manas Joglekar [Linkposting from the OpenAI alignment blog, where we post more speculative/technical/informal r...
"Backyard cat fight shows Schelling points preexist language" by jchan
16 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Two cats fighting for control over my backyard appear to have settled on a particular chain-link fence as the delineation between their territories. ...
"How AI Is Learning to Think in Secret" by Nicholas Andresen
09 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
On Thinkish, Neuralese, and the End of Readable Reasoning In September 2025, researchers published the internal monologue of OpenAI's GPT-o3 as ...
"On Owning Galaxies" by Simon Lermen
08 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
It seems to be a real view held by serious people that your OpenAI shares will soon be tradable for moons and galaxies. This includes eminent thinker...
"AI Futures Timelines and Takeoff Model: Dec 2025 Update" by elifland, bhalstead, Alex Kastner, Daniel Kokotajlo
06 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve significantly upgraded our timelines and takeoff models! It predicts when AIs will reach key capability milestones: for example, Automated Co...
"In My Misanthropy Era" by jenn
05 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
For the past year I've been sinking into the Great Books via the Penguin Great Ideas series, because I wanted to be conversant in the Great Conv...
"2025 in AI predictions" by jessicata
03 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Past years: 2023 2024 Continuing a yearly tradition, I evaluate AI predictions from past years, and collect a convenience sample of AI predictions ma...
"Good if make prior after data instead of before" by dynomight
27 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
They say you’re supposed to choose your prior in advance. That's why it's called a “prior”. First, you’re supposed to say say how p...
"Measuring no CoT math time horizon (single forward pass)" by ryan_greenblatt
27 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A key risk factor for scheming (and misalignment more generally) is opaque reasoning ability.One proxy for this is how good AIs are at solving math p...
"Recent LLMs can use filler tokens or problem repeats to improve (no-CoT) math performance" by ryan_greenblatt
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Prior results have shown that LLMs released before 2024 can't leverage 'filler tokens'—unrelated tokens prior to the model's fi...
"Turning 20 in the probable pre-apocalypse" by Parv Mahajan
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Master version of this on https://parvmahajan.com/2025/12/21/turning-20.html I turn 20 in January, and the world looks very strange. Probably, thing...
"Alignment Pretraining: AI Discourse Causes Self-Fulfilling (Mis)alignment" by Cam, Puria Radmard, Kyle O’Brien, David Africa, Samuel Ratnam, andyk
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
TL;DR LLMs pretrained on data about misaligned AIs themselves become less aligned. Luckily, pretraining LLMs with synthetic data about good AIs helps...
"Dancing in a World of Horseradish" by lsusr
22 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Commercial airplane tickets are divided up into coach, business class, and first class. In 2014, Etihad introduced The Residence, a premium experienc...
"Contradict my take on OpenPhil’s past AI beliefs" by Eliezer Yudkowsky
21 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At many points now, I've been asked in private for a critique of EA / EA's history / EA's impact and I have ad-libbed statements that ...
"Opinionated Takes on Meetups Organizing" by jenn
21 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Screwtape, as the global ACX meetups czar, has to be reasonable and responsible in his advice giving for running meetups. And the advice is great! It...
"How to game the METR plot" by shash42
21 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
TL;DR: In 2025, we were in the 1-4 hour range, which has only 14 samples in METR's underlying data. The topic of each sample is public, making i...
"Activation Oracles: Training and Evaluating LLMs as General-Purpose Activation Explainers" by Sam Marks, Adam Karvonen, James Chua, Subhash Kantamneni, Euan Ong, Julian Minder, Clément Dumas, Owain_Evans
20 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
TL;DR: We train LLMs to accept LLM neural activations as inputs and answer arbitrary questions about them in natural language. These Activation Oracl...
"Scientific breakthroughs of the year" by technicalities
17 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A couple of years ago, Gavin became frustrated with science journalism. No one was pulling together results across fields; the articles usually didn...