LessWrong posts by zvi

“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...

“Keeping Up Against the Joneses: Balsa’s 2025 Fundraiser” by Zvi

23 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Several years ago Zvi Mowshowitz founded Balsa Research, a tiny nonprofit research organization currently focused on quantifying the impact of the Jo...

“Keeping Up Against the Joneses: Balsa’s 2025 Fundraising Letter” by jenn, Zvi

22 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Balsa Research is a tiny nonprofit research organization currently focused on quantifying the impact of the Jones Act on the American economy, and wo...

“The Revolution of Rising Expectations” by Zvi

22 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Internet arguments like the $140,000 Question incident keep happening. The two sides say: Life sucks, you can’t get ahead, you can’t have a f...

“When Were Things The Best?” by Zvi

19 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

People remember their childhood world too fondly. You adapt to it. You forget the parts that sucked, many of which sucked rather really badly. It re...

“AI #147: Flash Forward” by Zvi

18 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This week I covered GPT 5.2, which I concluded is a frontier model only for the frontier. OpenAI also gave us Image 1.5 and a new image generation ...

“The $140K Question: Cost Changes Over Time” by Zvi

17 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In The $140,000 Question, I went over recent viral claims about poverty in America. The calculations behind the claims were invalid, the central cla...

“The $140,000 Question” by Zvi

16 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There was a no good, quite bad article by Michael Green that went viral. The condensed version was entitled ‘The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 Is t...

“GPT-5.2 Is Frontier Only For The Frontier” by Zvi

15 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Here we go again, only a few weeks after GPT-5.1 and a few more weeks after 5.0. There weren’t major safety concerns with GPT-5.2, so I’ll start...

“Monthly Roundup #37: December 2026” by Zvi

12 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

I’m doing the Monthly Roundup early this month so that next week can be GPT-5.2 and affordability of life week, assuming we are not overtaken by ot...

“AI #146: Chipping In” by Zvi

11 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It was touch and go, I’m worried GPT-5.2 is going to drop any minute now, but DeepSeek v3.2 was covered on Friday and after that we managed to get ...

“Childhood and Education #15: Got To Get Out” by Zvi

10 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The focus this time around is on the non-academic aspects of primary and secondary school, especially various questions around bullying and disciplin...

“Selling H200s to China Is Unwise and Unpopular” by Zvi

09 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

AI is the most important thing about the future. It is vital to national security. It will be central to economic, military and strategic supremacy. ...

“Little Echo” by Zvi

08 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

I believe that we will win. An echo of an old ad for the 2014 US men's World Cup team. It did not win. I was in Berkeley for the 2025 Secular Solst...

“DeepSeek v3.2 Is Okay And Cheap But Slow” by Zvi

05 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

DeepSeek v3.2 is DeepSeek's latest open model release with strong bencharks. Its paper contains some technical innovations that drive down cost. It'...

“AI #145: You’ve Got Soul” by Zvi

04 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The cycle of language model releases is, one at least hopes, now complete. OpenAI gave us GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.1-Codex-Max. xAI gave us Grok 4.1. Goo...

“On Dwarkesh Patel’s Second Interview With Ilya Sutskever” by Zvi

03 Dec 2025

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 ...

“Reward Mismatches in RL Cause Emergent Misalignment” by Zvi

02 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Learning to do misaligned-coded things anywhere teaches an AI (or a human) to do misaligned-coded things everywhere. So be sure you never, ever teach...

“Claude Opus 4.5 Is The Best Model Available” by Zvi

01 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Claude Opus 4.5 is the best model currently available. No model since GPT-4 has come close to the level of universal praise that I have seen for Cla...

Claude Opus 4.5: Model Card, Alignment and Safety

28 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

They saved the best for last. The contrast in model cards is stark. Google provided a brief overview of its tests for Gemini 3 Pro, with a lot of ‘...

AI #144: Thanks For the Models

27 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Thanks for everything. And I do mean everything. Everyone gave us a new model in the last few weeks. OpenAI gave us GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.1-Codex-Max. ...

The Big Nonprofits Post 2025

27 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There remain lots of great charitable giving opportunities out there. I have now had three opportunities to be a recommender for the Survival and Fl...

The Big Nonprofits Post 2025

27 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There remain lots of great charitable giving opportunities out there. I have now had three opportunities to be a recommender for the Survival and Fl...

The Big Nonprofits Post 2025

26 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There remain lots of great charitable giving opportunities out there. I have now had three opportunities to be a recommender for the Survival and Fl...

ChatGPT 5.1 Codex Max

25 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

OpenAI has given us GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, their best coding model for OpenAI Codex. They claim it is faster, more capable and token-efficient and has b...

Gemini 3 Pro Is a Vast Intelligence With No Spine

24 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's A Great Model, Sir One might even say the best model. It is for now my default weapon of choice. Google's official announcement ...

Gemini 3: Model Card and Safety Framework Report

21 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Gemini 3 Pro is an excellent model, sir. This is a frontier model release, so we start by analyzing the model card and safety framework report. The...

“AI #143: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once” by Zvi

20 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Last week had the release of GPT-5.1, which I covered on Tuesday. This week included Gemini 3, Nana Banana Pro, Grok 4.1, GPT 5.1 Pro, GPT 5.1-Codex...

“Monthly Roundup #36: November 2025” by Zvi

19 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Happy Gemini Week to those who celebrate. Coverage of the new release will begin on Friday. Meanwhile, here's this month's things that don’t go any...

“On Writing #2” by Zvi

18 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In honor of my dropping by Inkhaven at Lighthaven in Berkeley this week, I figured it was time for another writing roundup. You can find #1 here, fro...

“GPT 5.1 Follows Custom Instructions and Glazes” by Zvi

18 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There are other model releases to get to, but while we gather data on those, first things first. OpenAI has given us GPT-5.1: Same price including in...

“AI Craziness: Additional Suicide Lawsuits and The Fate of GPT-4o” by Zvi

14 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

GPT-4o has been a unique problem for a while, and has been at the center of the bulk of mental health incidents involving LLMs that didn’t involve ...

“AI #142: Common Ground” by Zvi

13 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Pope offered us wisdom, calling upon us to exercise moral discernment when building AI systems. Some rejected his teachings. We mark this for fut...

“The Pope Offers Wisdom” by Zvi

12 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Pope is a remarkably wise and helpful man. He offered us some wisdom. Yes, he is generally playing on easy mode by saying straightforwardly true...

“Kimi K2 Thinking” by Zvi

11 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

I previously covered Kimi K2, which now has a new thinking version. As I said at the time back in July, price in that the thinking version is coming....

“Variously Effective Altruism” by Zvi

10 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This post is a roundup of various things related to philanthropy, as you often find in the full monthly roundup. Preventing Value Drift Peter Thiel...

“On Sam Altman’s Second Conversation with Tyler Cowen” by Zvi

07 Nov 2025

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 ...

“AI #141: Give Us The Money” by Zvi

06 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

OpenAI does not waste time. On Friday I covered their announcement that they had ‘completed their recapitalization’ by converting into a PBC, in...

“Anthropic Commits To Model Weight Preservation” by Zvi

05 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Anthropic announced a first step on model deprecation and preservation, promising to retain the weights of all models seeing significant use, includi...

“OpenAI: The Battle of the Board: Ilya’s Testimony” by Zvi

04 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

New Things Have Come To Light The Information offers us new information about what happened when the board if AI unsuccessfully tried to fire Sam Alt...

“Crime and Punishment #1” by Zvi

03 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's been a long time coming that I spin off Crime into its own roundup series. This is only about Ordinary Decent Crime. High crimes are not covere...

“OpenAI Moves To Complete Potentially The Largest Theft In Human History” by Zvi

31 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

OpenAI is now set to become a Public Benefit Corporation, with its investors entitled to uncapped profit shares. Its nonprofit foundation will retain...

“AI #140: Trying To Hold The Line” by Zvi

30 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Sometimes the best you can do is try to avoid things getting even worse even faster. Thus, one has to write articles such as ‘Please Do Not Sell B3...

“Please Do Not Sell B30A Chips to China” by Zvi

29 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Chinese and Americans are currently negotiating a trade deal. There are plenty of ways to generate a win-win deal, and early signs of this are pr...

“AI Craziness Mitigation Efforts” by Zvi

28 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

AI chatbots in general, and OpenAI and ChatGPT and especially GPT-4o the absurd sycophant in particular, have long had a problem with issues around me...

“Asking (Some Of) The Right Questions” by Zvi

27 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Consider this largely a follow-up to Friday's post about a statement aimed at creating common knowledge around it being unwise to build superintellig...

“New Statement Calls For Not Building Superintelligence For Now” by Zvi

24 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Building superintelligence poses large existential risks. Also known as: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Where ‘it’ is superintelligence, and...

“AI #139: The Overreach Machines” by Zvi

23 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The big release this week was OpenAI giving us a new browser, called Atlas. The idea of Atlas is that it is Chrome, except with ChatGPT integrated t...

“On Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast With Andrej Karpathy” by Zvi

21 Oct 2025

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 ...

“Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble” by Zvi

20 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We have the classic phenomenon where suddenly everyone decided it is good for your social status to say we are in an ‘AI bubble.’ Are these peop...

“AI #138 Part 2: Watch Out For Documents” by Zvi

17 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As usual when things split, Part 1 is mostly about capabilities, and Part 2 is mostly about a mix of policy and alignment. Table of Contents ...

“AI #138 Part 1: The People Demand Erotic Sycophants” by Zvi

16 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Well, one person says ‘demand,’ another says ‘give the thumbs up to’ or ‘welcome our new overlords.’ Why quibble? Surely we’re all maki...

“Monthly Roundup #35: October 2025” by Zvi

15 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It is increasingly often strange compiling the monthly roundup, because life comes at us fast. I look at various things I’ve written, and it feels ...

“Trade Escalation, Supply Chain Vulnerabilities and Rare Earth Metals” by Zvi

14 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What is going on with, and what should we do about, the Chinese declaring extraterritorial exports controls on rare earth metals, which threaten to g...

“OpenAI #15: More on OpenAI’s Paranoid Lawfare Against Advocates of SB 53” by Zvi

13 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A little over a month ago, I documented how OpenAI had descended into paranoia and bad faith lobbying surrounding California's SB 53. This included ...

“2025 State of AI Report and Predictions” by Zvi

10 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The 2025 State of AI Report is out, with lots of fun slides and a full video presentation. They’ve been consistently solid, providing a kind of out...

“AI #137: An OpenAI App For That” by Zvi

09 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

OpenAI is making deals and shipping products. They locked in their $500 billion valuation and then got 10% of AMD in exchange for buying a ton of chi...

“NEPA, Permitting and Energy Roundup #2” by Zvi

08 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's been about a year since the last one of these. Given the long cycle, I have done my best to check for changes but things may have changed on any...

“Bending The Curve” by Zvi

07 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The odds are against you and the situation is grim. Your scrappy band are the only ones facing down a growing wave of powerful inhuman entities with...

“Medical Roundup #5” by Zvi

06 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Some amazing things are going on, not all of which involve mRNA, although please please those of you with the ability to do so, do your part to ensur...

“Sora and The Big Bright Screen Slop Machine” by Zvi

03 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

OpenAI gave us two very different Sora releases. Here is the official announcement. The part where they gave us a new and improved video generator? ...

“AI #136: A Song and Dance” by Zvi

02 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The big headline this week was the song, which was the release of Claude Sonnet 4.5. I covered this in two parts, first the System Card and Alignment...

“Claude Sonnet 4.5 Is A Very Good Model” by Zvi

01 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A few weeks ago, Anthropic announced Claude Opus 4.1 and promised larger announcements within a few weeks. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the larger announceme...

“Claude Sonnet 4.5: System Card and Alignment” by Zvi

30 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Claude Sonnet 4.5 was released yesterday. Anthropic credibly describes it as the best coding, agentic and computer use model in the world. At least w...

“On Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast With Richard Sutton” by Zvi

29 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This seems like a good opportunity to do some of my classic detailed podcast coverage. The conventions are: This is not complete, points I did no...

“Economics Roundup #6” by Zvi

26 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

I obviously cover many economical things in the ordinary course of business, but I try to reserve the sufficiently out of place or in the weeds stuff...

“AI #135: OpenAI Shows Us The Money” by Zvi

25 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

OpenAI is here this week to show us the money, as in a $100 billion investment from Nvidia and operationalization of a $400 billion buildout for Star...

“OpenAI Shows Us The Money” by Zvi

24 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

They also show us the chips, and the data centers. It is quite a large amount of money, and chips, and some very large data centers. ...

“More Reactions to If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by Zvi

23 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Previously I shared various reactions to If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, along with my own highly positive review. Reactions continued to pour in...

“H1-B And The $100k Fee” by Zvi

22 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Trump Administration is attempting to put a $100k fee on future H1-B applications, including those that are exempt from the lottery and cap, unle...

“Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by Zvi

19 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Where ‘it’ is superintelligence, an AI smarter and more capable than humans. And where ‘everyone dies’ means that everyone dies. No, seriou...