LessWrong posts by zvi

“Childhood and Education #18: Do The Math” by Zvi

12 May 2026

Contributed by Lukas

We did reading yesterday. Now we do the math. Math is hard. It does not have to be this hard. A large part of the reason math is hard, or boring, i...

“Childhood And Education #17: Is Our Children Reading” by Zvi

11 May 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Reading is the most fundamental thing in education. If you can read, you can do and learn everything else. If you can’t read, well, you’re screwe...

“Claude Code, Codex and Agentic Coding #8” by Zvi

08 May 2026

Contributed by Lukas

When I started this series, everyone was going crazy for coding agents. Now a lot more people are going crazy for coding agents, as well they should...

“AI #167: The Prior Restraint Era Begins” by Zvi

07 May 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The era of training frontier models and then releasing them whenever you wanted? That was fun while it lasted. It looks likely to be over now. The W...

“What is Anthropic?” by Zvi

06 May 2026

Contributed by Lukas

What is Anthropic? How does it relate to Claude? What is OpenAI? What is ChatGPT? How does OpenAI relate to it? Is it a mere tool? Is a future of Too...

“The AI Ad-Hoc Prior Restraint Era Begins” by Zvi

05 May 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The White House has ordered Anthropic not to expand access to Mythos, and is at least seriously considering a complete about-face of American Frontie...

“Housing Roundup #15: The War Against Renters” by Zvi

04 May 2026

Contributed by Lukas

So many are under the strange belief that there is something terrible about not owning the house in which you live. So we massively subsidize home o...

“Housing Roundup #14: You Can’t Build That” by Zvi

01 May 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Why can’t you build it? Because you aren’t allowed to build it. Not in the place you want to build it. Or at least, not the way you want, to th...

“Housing Roundup #13: More Dakka” by Zvi

01 May 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Build more housing where people want to live. The rest is commentary. If there is enough housing, it will be affordable, people will afford more hou...

“AI #166: Google Sells Out” by Zvi

30 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This was the week of GPT-5.5. It is an excellent model, sir, and OpenAI is competitive with Anthropic's top public offering for the first time since ...

“The Most Important Charts In The World” by Zvi

29 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

We all need a break so: What is the most important chart in the world? I decided to ask Twitter, and got a lot of good answers. So today, with few ...

“GPT-5.5: Capabilities and Reactions” by Zvi

28 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The system card for GPT-5.5 mostly told us what we expected. See this thread from Drake Thomas for some comparisons to Anthropic's model card for Opu...

“GPT 5.5: The System Card” by Zvi

27 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Last week, OpenAI announced GPT-5.5, including GPT-5.5-Pro. My overall read here is that GPT-5.5 is a solid improvement, and for many purposes GPT-5...

“Monthly Roundup #41: April 2025” by Zvi

24 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

AI continue to accelerate and dominate the schedule, which is why this is a bit late, but we do occasionally need to pay our respects to the Goddess ...

“AI #165: In Our Image” by Zvi

23 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This was the week of Claude Opus 4.7. The reception was more mixed than usual. It clearly has the intelligence and chops, especially for coding task...

“Opus 4.7 Part 3: Model Welfare” by Zvi

22 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

It is thanks to Anthropic that we get to have this discussion in the first place. Only they, among the labs, take the problem seriously enough to att...

“Opus 4.7 Part 2: Capabilities and Reactions” by Zvi

21 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Claude Opus 4.7 raises a lot of key model welfare related concerns. I was planning to do model welfare first, but I’m having some good conversation...

“Opus 4.7 Part 1: The Model Card” by Zvi

20 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Less than a week after completing coverage of Claude Mythos, here we are again as Anthropic gives us Claude Opus 4.7. So here we are, with another 2...

“AI #164: Pre Opus” by Zvi

17 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This is a day late because, given the discourse around Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Jensen Huang, I pushed the weekly to Friday. This week's cove...

“On Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast With Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang” by Zvi

17 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was one of those. So here we go. ...

“Claude Code, Codex and Agentic Coding #7: Auto Mode” by Zvi

15 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

As we all try to figure out what Mythos means for us down the line, the world of practical agentic coding continues, with the latest array of upgrade...

“Claude Mythos #3: Capabilities and Additions” by Zvi

14 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

To round out coverage of Mythos, today covers capabilities other than cyber, and anything else additional not covered by the first two posts, includi...

“Political Violence Is Never Acceptable” by Zvi

13 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Nor is the threat or implication of violence. Period. Ever. No exceptions. It is completely unacceptable. I condemn it in the strongest possible ter...

“Claude Mythos #2: Cybersecurity and Project Glasswing” by Zvi

10 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Anthropic is not going to release its new most capable model, Claude Mythos, to the public any time soon. Its cyber capabilities are too dangerous to...

“Claude Mythos: The System Card” by Zvi

09 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Claude Mythos is different. This is the first model other than GPT-2 that is at first not being released for public use at all. With GPT-2 the dela...

“AI #163: Mythos Quest” by Zvi

08 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

There exists an AI model, Claude Mythos, that has discovered critical safety vulnerabilities in every major operating system and browser. If released...

“OpenAI #16: A History and a Proposal” by Zvi

07 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The real news today is that Anthropic has partnered with the top companies in cybersecurity to try and patch everyone's systems to fix all the thousa...

“Housing Roundup #13: More Dakka” by Zvi

06 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Build more housing where people want to live. The rest is commentary. If there is enough housing, it will be affordable, people will afford more hou...

“Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy v3: Dive Into The Details” by Zvi

03 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Wednesday's post talked about the implications of Anthropic changing from v2.2 to v3.0 of its RSP, including that this broke promises that many peopl...

“AI #162: Visions of Mythos” by Zvi

02 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Anthropic had some problem with leaks this week. We learned that they are sitting on a new larger-than-Opus AI model, Mythos, that they believe offer...

“Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy v3: A Matter of Trust” by Zvi

01 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Anthropic has revised its Responsible Scaling Policy to v3. The changes involved include abandoning many previous commitments, including one not to ...

“Movie Review: The AI Doc” by Zvi

31 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a brilliant piece of work. (This will be a fully spoilorific overview. If you haven’t seen ...

“AI #161 Part 2: Every Debate on AI” by Zvi

30 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

AI discorce. AI discorce never changes. That's not actually true. But it is true to a rather frustrating degree, for those of us who need to be in th...

“Anthropic vs. DoW #6: The Court Rules” by Zvi

27 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Last night, Anthropic was given its preliminary injunction, with a stay of seven days. Emil Michael is a very angry person right now. So is the Hono...

“AI #161 Part 1: 80,000 Interviews” by Zvi

26 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The major technical advances this week were in agentic coding, as covered yesterday. The major non-DoW political and alignment developments will be ...

“Claude Code, Cowork and Codex #6: Claude Code Auto Use and Full Cowork Computer Use” by Zvi

25 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Whatever else you think about Anthropic's agentic coding department, they ship. The highlights of this edition are three related big upgrades. You ...

“Book Review: Open Socrates (Part 1)” by Zvi

24 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

These are all important, in their own way, call it a treasure hunt and collect them all… “Know thyself.” – The Oracle “Know thine ene...

“Book Review: Open Socrates (Part 2)” by Zvi

24 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Yesterday I posted Part 1. Read that first. This is Part 2 of 2. Table of Contents The Socratic Method. The Paradox Paradox. Rubber Ducking...

“The Federal AI Policy Framework: An Improvement, But My Offer Is (Still Almost) Nothing” by Zvi

20 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The Federal AI Policy Framework has been released. Well, it is a four page outline. Mostly it just reiterates existing such outlines. But that is four...

“AI #160: What Passes For a Pause” by Zvi

19 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

A lot happened, but by today's standards this felt like a quiet week. I was happy for the break, and I hope that we get to continue relatively relaxi...

“Anthropic vs. DoW #5: Motions Filed” by Zvi

18 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The news has thankfully quieted down on this front, and is mostly about the lawsuit as we build towards a hearing next week, after which we will find...

“Medical Roundup #7” by Zvi

17 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Things are relatively quiet on the AI front, so I figured it's time to check in on some other things that have been going on, including various devel...

“Monthly Roundup #40: March 2026” by Zvi

16 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

It is that time again. After events surrounding Anthropic and the Department of War, I plan on taking full advantage of whatever lulls I can get. Th...

“AI #159: See You In Court” by Zvi

12 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The conflict between Anthropic and the Department of War has now moved to the courts, where Anthropic has challenged the official supply chain risk d...

“GPT-5.4 Is A Substantial Upgrade” by Zvi

11 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Benchmarks have never been less useful for telling us which models are best. They are good for giving a general sense of the landscape. They definit...

“Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Codex #5” by Zvi

09 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

It feels good to get back to some of the fun stuff. The comments here can double as a place for GPT-5.4 reactions, in addition to my Twitter thread....

“Anthropic Officially, Arbitrarily and Capriciously Designated a Supply Chain Risk” by Zvi

06 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Make no mistake about what is happening. The Department of War (DoW) demanded Anthropic bend the knee, and give them ‘unfettered access’ to Clau...

“AI #158: The Department of War” by Zvi

05 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This was the worst week I have had in quite a while, maybe ever. The situation between Anthropic and the Department of War (DoW) spun completely out...

“Gemini 3.1 Pro Aces Benchmarks, I Suppose” by Zvi

04 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

I’ve been trying to find a slot for this one for a while. I am thrilled that today had sufficiently little news that I am comfortable posting this....

“A Tale of Three Contracts” by Zvi

03 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The attempt on Friday by Secretary of War Pete Hegsted to label Anthropic as a supply chain risk and commit corporate murder had a variety of motivat...

“Secretary of War Tweets That Anthropic is Now a Supply Chain Risk” by Zvi

02 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This is the long version of what happened so far. I will strive for shorter ones later, when I have the time to write them. Most of you should read ...

“Anthropic and the DoW: Anthropic Responds” by Zvi

27 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The Department of War gave Anthropic until 5:01pm on Friday the 27th to either give the Pentagon ‘unfettered access’ to Claude for ‘all lawful ...

“AI #157: Burn the Boats” by Zvi

26 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Events continue to be fast and furious. This was the first actually stressful week of the year. That was mostly due to issues around Anthropic and ...

“Anthropic and the Department of War” by Zvi

25 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The situation in AI in 2026 is crazy. The confrontation between Anthropic and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is a new level of crazy. It risks turning...

“Citrini’s Scenario Is A Great But Deeply Flawed Thought Experiment” by Zvi

24 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

A viral essay from Citrini about how AI bullishness could be bearish was impactful enough for Bloomberg to give it partial responsibility for a decli...

“Claude Sonnet 4.6 Gives You Flexibility” by Zvi

23 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Anthropic first gave us Claude Opus 4.6, then followed up with Claude Sonnet 4.6. For most purposes Sonnet 4.6 is not as capable as Opus 4.6, but it...

“AI #155: Welcome to Recursive Self-Improvement” by Zvi

20 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This was the week of Claude Opus 4.6, and also of ChatGPT-5.3-Codex. Both leading models got substantial upgrades, although OpenAI's is confined to C...

“AI #156 Part 2: Errors in Rhetoric” by Zvi

20 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Things that are being pushed into the future right now: Gemini 3.1 Pro and Gemini DeepThink V2. Claude Sonnet 4.6. Grok 4.20. Updates on Agenti...

“AI #156 Part 1: They Do Mean The Effect On Jobs” by Zvi

19 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

There was way too much going on this week to not split, so here we are. This first half contains all the usual first-half items, with a focus on proj...

“Monthly Roundup #39: February 2026” by Zvi

18 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

There really is a lot going on these days. I held off posting this because I was trying to see if I could write a net helpful post about the current...

“On Dwarkesh Patel’s 2026 Podcast With Elon Musk and Other Recent Elon Musk Things” by Zvi

17 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was one of those. So here we go. ...

“On Dwarkesh Patel’s 2026 Podcast With Dario Amodei” by Zvi

16 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was very clearly one of those. So here we ...

“ChatGPT-5.3-Codex Is Also Good At Coding” by Zvi

13 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

OpenAI is back with a new Codex model, released the same day as Claude Opus 4.6. The headline pitch is it combines the coding skills of GPT-5.2-Code...

“Claude Opus 4.6 Escalates Things Quickly” by Zvi

11 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Life comes at you increasingly fast. Two months after Claude Opus 4.5 we get a substantial upgrade in Claude Opus 4.6. The same day, we got GPT-5.3-C...

“Claude Opus 4.6: System Card Part 2: Frontier Alignment” by Zvi

10 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Coverage of Claude Opus 4.6 started yesterday with the mundane alignment and model welfare sections of the model card. Today covers the kinds of saf...

“Claude Opus 4.6: System Card Part 1: Mundane Alignment and Model Welfare” by Zvi

09 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Claude Opus 4.6 is here. It was built with and mostly evaluated by Claude. Their headline pitch includes: 1M token context window (in beta) with ...

“Claude Code #4: From The Before Times” by Zvi

09 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Claude Opus 4.6 and agent swarms were announced yesterday. That's some big upgrades for Claude Code. OpenAI, the competition, offered us GPT-5.3-Cod...

“Claude Code #4: From The Before Times” by Zvi

06 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Claude Opus 4.6 and agent swarms were announced yesterday. That's some big upgrades for Claude Code. OpenAI, the competition, offered us GPT-5.3-Cod...

“AI #154: Claw Your Way To The Top” by Zvi

05 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Remember OpenClaw and Moltbook? One might say they already seem a little quaint. So earlier-this-week. That's the internet having an absurdly short...

“Kimi K2.5” by Zvi

04 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

I had to delay this a little bit, but the results are in and Kimi K2.5 is pretty good. Table of Contents Official Introduction. On Your Mark...

“Unless That Claw Is The Famous OpenClaw” by Zvi

03 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

First we must covered Moltbook. Now we can double back and cover OpenClaw. Do you want a generally impowered, initiative-taking AI agent that has ac...

“Welcome to Moltbook” by Zvi

02 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Moltbook is a public social network for AI agents modeled after Reddit. It was named after a new agent framework that was briefly called Moltbot, was...

“On The Adolescence of Technology” by Zvi

30 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is back with another extended essay, The Adolescence of Technology. This is the follow up to his previous essay Machines ...

“AI #153: Living Documents” by Zvi

29 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This was Anthropic Vision week where at DWATV, which caused things to fall a bit behind on other fronts even within AI. Several topics are getting pu...

“Open Problems With Claude’s Constitution” by Zvi

28 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The first post in this series looked at the structure of Claude's Constitution. The second post in this series looked at its ethical framework. Thi...

“The Claude Constitution’s Ethical Framework” by Zvi

27 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This is the second part of my three part series on the Claude Constitution. Part one outlined the structure of the Constitution. Part two, this pos...

“Claude’s Constitutional Structure” by Zvi

26 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Claude's Constitution is an extraordinary document, and will be this week's focus. Its aim is nothing less than helping humanity transition to a wor...

“Dating Roundup #11: Going Too Meta” by Zvi

23 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

If there's several things this blog endorses, one of them would be going meta. It's time. The big picture awaits. You’re Single Because You Liv...

“AI #152: Brought To You By The Torment Nexus” by Zvi

22 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Anthropic released a new constitution for Claude. I encourage those interested to read the document, either in whole or in part. I intend to cover it...

“Claude Codes #3” by Zvi

21 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

We’re back with all the Claude that's fit to Code. I continue to have great fun with it and find useful upgrades, but the biggest reminder is that ...

“ChatGPT Self Portrait” by Zvi

20 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

A short fun one today, so we have a reference point for this later. This post was going around my parts of Twitter: @gmltony: Go to your ChatGPT and...

“Medical Roundup #6” by Zvi

19 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The main thing to know this time around is that the whole crazy ‘what is causing the rise in autism?’ debacle is over actual nothing. There is no...

“Monthly Roundup #38: January 2026” by Zvi

16 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Good news, we managed to make some cuts. I think? Table of Contents California In Crisis. Bad News. Opportunity Knocks. Government Working...

“AI #151: While Claude Coworks” by Zvi

15 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Claude Code and Cowork are growing so much that it is overwhelming Anthropic's servers. Claude Code and Cowork news has for weeks now been a large po...

“When Will They Take Our Jobs?” by Zvi

14 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

And once they take our jobs, will we be able to find new ones? Will AI take those too? Seb Krier recently wrote an unusually good take on that, whic...

“Claude Coworks” by Zvi

13 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Claude Code does a lot more than code, but the name and command line scare people. Anthropic realized a rebrand was in order. Two weeks later, we ha...

“Dating Roundup #10: Gendered Expectations” by Zvi

12 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The game is asymmetrical. Life is not fair. Doesn’t matter. Play to win the game. You’re Single Because Your Emotions Gave Her The Ick Ah, ...

“Claude Codes” by Zvi

09 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is so hot right now. The cool kids use it for everything. They definitely use it for coding, often letting it write all of...

“AI #150: While Claude Codes” by Zvi

08 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Claude Code is the talk of the town, and of the Twitter. It has reached critical mass. Suddenly, everyone is talking about how it is transforming th...

“Advancements In Self-Driving Cars” by Zvi

07 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Going Full San Francisco Waymo goes Full San Francisco West Bay except for SFO: Jeff Dean: Exciting expansion! @Waymo now serves the whole SF Bay...

“Fertility Roundup #6: The Art of More Dakka” by Zvi

06 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The central message of the fertility roundups has always been that we have a choice. If we do want to raise fertility, we can do that. People respon...

“Dos Capital” by Zvi

05 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This week, Philip Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel wrote Capital in the 22nd Century. One of my goals for Q1 2026 is to write unified explainer posts for...

“Fertility Roundup #5: Causation” by Zvi

02 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

There are two sides of developments in fertility. How bad is it? What is causing the massive, catastrophic declines in fertility? What can we do ...

“AI #149: 3” by Zvi

01 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The Rationalist Project was our last best hope that we might not try to build it. It failed. But in the year of the Coding Agent, it became somethi...

“2025 Year in Review” by Zvi

31 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's that time. It's been a hell of a year. At the start we barely had reasoning models. Now we have Claude Code and Opus 4.5. I don’t code. Yet ...

“Dating Roundup #9: Signals and Selection” by Zvi

30 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ultimately, it comes down to one question. Are you in? For you, and for them. You’re Single Because They Got The Ick The Ick, the ultimate re...

“Dating Roundup #8: Tactics” by Zvi

29 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Here's to everyone having a great 2026 in all ways, so I figured what better way to end the year than with a little practical advice. Like everything...

“Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids Be Kids” by Zvi

26 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Revolution of Rising Requirements has many elements. The most onerous are the supervisory requirements on children. They have become, as Kelsey P...

“AI #148: Christmas Break” by Zvi

25 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Claude Opus 4.5 did so well on the METR task length graph they’re going to need longer tasks, and we still haven’t scored Gemini 3 Pro or GPT-5.2...

“Zvi’s 2025 In Movies” by Zvi

24 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Now that I am tracking all the movies I watch via Letterboxd, it seems worthwhile to go over the results at the end of the year, and look for lessons...