LessWrong posts by zvi

“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...

“AI #134: If Anyone Reads It” by Zvi

18 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It is book week. As in the new book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Sores, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Yesterday I gathered various people's re...

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

17 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

No, Seriously, If Anyone Builds It, [Probably] Everyone Dies My very positive full review was briefly accidentally posted and emailed out last Fri...

“AI Craziness Notes” by Zvi

16 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As in, cases of AI driving people crazy, or reinforcing their craziness. Alas, I expect this to become an ongoing series worthy of its own posts. ...

“Monthly Roundup #34: September 2025” by Zvi

15 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

All the news that's fit to print, but has nowhere to go. Important Rules Reminder This important rule is a special case of an even more importa...

“AI #131 Part 2: Various Misaligned Things” by Zvi

12 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It doesn’t look good, on many fronts, especially taking a stake in Intel. We continue. Table of Contents America Extorts 10% of Intel. Nic...

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

12 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...

“AI #133: America Could Use More Energy” by Zvi

11 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Even in quiet weeks like this one, there are noticeable incremental upgrades. The cost of the best video generation tool, Veo 3, went down by half. C...

“Childhood and Education #14: The War On Education” by Zvi

10 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The purported main purpose of school, and even of childhood, is educating children. Many people are actively opposed to this idea. Either they have...

“Yes, AI Continues To Make Rapid Progress, Including Towards AGI” by Zvi

09 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

That does not mean AI will successfully make it all the way to AGI and superintelligence, or that it will make it there soon or on any given time fra...

“OpenAI #14: OpenAI Descends Into Paranoia and Bad Faith Lobbying” by Zvi

08 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

I am a little late to the party on several key developments at OpenAI: OpenAI's Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane was central to the creat...

“AI #132 Part 2: Actively Making It Worse” by Zvi

05 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's rough out there. Have we tried engaging in less active sabotage? No? Carry on. Table of Contents Quiet Speculations. What will become th...

“AI #132 Part 1: Improved AI Detection” by Zvi

04 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

One result of going on vacation was that I wasn’t able to spin events off into focused posts this week, so I’m going to fall back on splitting th...

“Startup Roundup #3” by Zvi

03 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Startup Roundups (#1, #2) look like they’re settling in as an annual tradition. I’ve been catching up on queued roundups this week as the family...

“Traffic and Transit Roundup #1” by Zvi

02 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Traffic and transit are finally getting a roundup all their own. I’ll start out with various victory laps on the awesomeness that is New York City...

“Dating Roundup #7: Back to Basics” by Zvi

01 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There's quite a lot in the queue since last time, so this is the first large chunk of it, which focuses on apps and otherwise finding an initial conn...

“AI #131 Part 2: Various Misaligned Things” by Zvi

29 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It doesn’t look good, on many fronts, especially taking a stake in Intel. We continue. Table of Contents America Extorts 10% of Intel. Nic...

“AI #131 Part 1: Gemini 2.5 Flash Image is Cool” by Zvi

28 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Once again we’ve reached the point where the weekly update needs to be split in two. Thus, the alignment and policy coverage will happen tomorrow. ...

“Are They Starting To Take Our Jobs?” by Zvi

27 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Is generative AI making it harder for young people to find jobs? My answer is: Yes, definitely, in terms of for any given job that exists finding ...

“Reports Of AI Not Progressing Or Offering Mundane Utility Are Often Greatly Exaggerated” by Zvi

26 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the wake of the confusions around GPT-5, this week had yet another round of claims that AI wasn’t progressing, or AI isn’t or won’t create m...

“Arguments About AI Consciousness Seem Highly Motivated And At Best Overconfident” by Zvi

25 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

I happily admit I am deeply confused about consciousness. I don’t feel confident I understand what it is, what causes it, which entities have it, ...

“DeepSeek v3.1 Is Not Having a Moment” by Zvi

22 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What if DeepSeek released a model claiming 66 on SWE and almost no one tried using it? Would it be any good? Would you be able to tell? Or would we ge...

“AI #130: Talking Past The Sale” by Zvi

21 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

One potentially big event was that DeepSeek came out with v3.1. Initial response was very quiet, but this is DeepSeek and there are some strong score...

“AI Companion Conditions” by Zvi

20 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The conditions are: Lol, we’re Meta. Or lol we’re xAI. This expands upon many previous discussions, including the AI Companion Piece. Lol We’...

“Monthly Roundup #33: August 2025” by Zvi

19 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

I got suckered into paying attention to multiple non-AI political stories this month: The shooting of the messenger, in violation of the most sacred ...

“GPT-5: The Reverse DeepSeek Moment” by Zvi

18 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Everyone agrees that the release of GPT-5 was botched. Everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT-4o and o3 to GPT-5 was not of similar si...

“Spending Too Much Time At Airports” by Zvi

15 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In honor of Nate Silver's analysis of when to leave for the airport, and because it's been an intense week, I thought I’d offer my thoughts on vari...

“GPT-5s Are Alive: Synthesis” by Zvi

13 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What do I ultimately make of all the new versions of GPT-5? The practical offerings and how they interact continues to change by the day. I expect m...

“GPT-5s Are Alive: Outside Reactions, the Router and the Resurrection of GPT-4o” by Zvi

12 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A key problem with having and interpreting reactions to GPT-5 is that it is often unclear whether the reaction is to GPT-5, GPT-5-Router or GPT-5-Thi...

“GPT-5s Are Alive: Basic Facts, Benchmarks and the Model Card” by Zvi

11 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

GPT-5 was a long time coming. Is it a good model, sir? Yes. In practice it is a good, but not great, model. Or rather, it is several good models re...

“OpenAI’s GPT-OSS Is Already Old News” by Zvi

08 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

That's on OpenAI. I don’t schedule their product releases. Since it takes several days to gather my reports on new models, we are doing our coverag...