LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

"AIs can now often do massive easy-to-verify SWE tasks and I’ve updated towards shorter timelines" by ryan_greenblatt

06 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

I've recently updated towards substantially shorter AI timelines and much faster progress in some areas. [1] The largest updates I've made...

"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...