LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

“The best simple argument for Pausing AI?” by Gary Marcus

03 Jul 2025

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Not saying we should pause AI, but consider the following argument: Alignment without the capacity to follow rules is hopeless. You can’t possibly follow laws like Asimov's Laws (or better alternatives to them) if you can’t reliably learn to abide by simple constraints like the rules of chess. LLMs can’t reliably follow rules. As discussed in Marcus on AI yesterday, per data from Mathieu Acher, even reasoning models like o3 in fact empirically struggle with the rules of chess. And they do this even though they can explicit explain those rules (see same article). The Apple “thinking” paper, which I have discussed extensively in 3 recent articles in my Substack, gives another example, where an LLM can’t play Tower of Hanoi with 9 pegs. (This is not a token-related artifact). Four other papers have shown related failures in compliance with moderately complex rules in the last month. [...] --- First published: June 30th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q2PdrjowtXkYQ5whW/the-best-simple-argument-for-pausing-ai --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

“The best simple argument for Pausing AI?” by Gary Marcus

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet

Other episodes from LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

"Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance" by Martin Sustrik

"The inaugural Redwood Research podcast" by Buck, ryan_greenblatt

"Canada Lost Its Measles Elimination Status Because We Don’t Have Enough Nurses Who Speak Low German" by jenn

[Linkpost] "“The first two weeks are the hardest”: my first digital declutter" by mingyuan

"Why we are excited about confession!" by boazbarak, Gabriel Wu, Manas Joglekar

"Backyard cat fight shows Schelling points preexist language" by jchan

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