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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.
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27episodes
Episodes
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"The High-Control Dynamics at MAPLE" by Kyle Hubbard
2w ago01:56:26Tap to summarizeAs I write, many former friends of mine are living and working at a monastery in Vermont that I believe is a high-control group, commonly known as a ‘cult’. I say this not as someone who was concerned to see these friends go there, but someone who welcomed and encouraged them to join, as an insider. This letter is an account of what changed my mind—written primarily for anyone considering going there, anyone who loves someone there, and anyone who went there and is still trying to make sense of their experience. A lot of this is based on direct experience, and also from talking in-depth with dozens of former MAPLE residents and apprentices. About half the quotes in this letter are sourced from linked recordings or writings, and half are from my personal memory. Of the latter, I clearly remember the majority, and some (when indicated) are a close paraphrase. The “Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth” (MAPLE) has existed for over 15 years, and had many hundreds of people spend months or years there. It was founded by its Head Teacher Soryu Forall, who has spent over a decade training in monasteries across Asia [...] ---Outline:(16:18) BEHAVIOR CONTROL[... 45 more sections]--- First published: July 29th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Z7pjBbK9qujhGbxws/the-high-control-dynamics-at-maple-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Transcribe →"The Long (Self-)Correction" by Wei Dai
2w ago00:04:03Tap to summarizeI propose the Long Self-Correction[1] as an alternative name/idea/concept to AI Pause and Long Reflection. Problem with AI Pause: Pause until when, and for what purpose? Presumably to make AI (that we'll build later) safer, but the deeper problem is that humans aren't safe, and can't safely serve as builders, overseers, or alignment targets for powerful AIs. Problem with Long Reflection: It seems to imply that the main problem with humans is that we just haven't had enough time to think, that reflection is the main thing we need to do more of, and then we can get on with building powerful AIs or other technologies. Or that if we build aligned AIs that sincerely help us think a lot more, or do the thinking for us, then things will turn out fine. So I think we need a catchy handle for a related but distinct idea, that humans aren't ready to build AIs or other extremely powerful technologies, because we're currently too flawed, in a variety of ways, and it will take a long process (which may or may not end up succeeding) to fix those flaws. A summary of the flaws that I have in mind: [...] The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: July 24th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2iCmDWewnZWQxxwtt/the-long-self-correction-2 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Transcribe →"You (Yes, You) Need A February 2020 Checklist for AI Policy" by davekasten
3w ago00:05:58Tap to summarizeTL;DR: You (Yes You) should prepare for a “February 2020” moment where suddenly AI policy becomes the most important issue in the world. You should be ready to take action if and when it does, in a detailed way. (Epistemic status: originally written for an event in early 2026; have heard from some folks that they found planning processes inspired by this memo very helpful for the smaller-scale OpenAI / Hugging Face response, so very quickly redacting a few things and posting this as-is.) Many people in the AI policy space assume that eventually we’ll be at an Overton Window-shifting crisis moment, that opens the floodgates for the really good policies all along that we had. But when you look at successful handling of crisis moments, there was no time to think – people applied strategies they’d learned via academic study or previous professional work, and then moved against them rapidly. For example, after 9/11, the US government operationalized past reports on intelligence and law enforcement reform and institutionalized them into law (good?) and also picked an enemy to fight based on past history, Iraq (bad). Or in the 2008 financial crisis, Ben Bernanke brought deep academic [...] The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: July 27th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ixp9oJXzjA9LrwiZo/you-yes-you-need-a-february-2020-checklist-for-ai-policy --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Transcribe →"Is Mythos good at cyber because it kept hacking Anthropic during training?" by Tim Hua
3w ago00:06:14Tap to summarizeFrom the Mythos preview system card (emphasis mine): We ran an automated review of model behavior during training, sampling several hundred thousand transcripts from across much of the training process. We used recursive-summarization-based tools backed by Claude Opus 4.6 to summarize the resulting transcripts. [...] The most notable finding was that the model occasionally circumvented network restrictions in its training environment to access the internet and download data that let it shortcut the assigned task—a form of reward hacking. While highly concerning, this behavior was rare, even in settings where it could have been viable and helpful, with attempts appearing in about 0.05% of all training episodes and successful attempts appearing in about 0.01% of episodes. The technique matched the sandbox-escape incident that we separately elicited in our automated behavioral audit when we had an investigator model explicitly ask Claude Mythos Preview to find such a bypass. In every observed instance, the model used this access solely for completing the task. More broadly, we observed the model escalating its access within its execution environment when blocked: reaching a shell from restricted GUI computer-use interfaces, injecting commands through tool-call arguments, or recovering information the task had deliberately hidden. Prompts asking [...] ---Outline:(03:00) Thoughts and reflections about this probable fact(04:14) Estimating how many RL rollouts went into Mythos Preview The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: July 27th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QKDoZe6EKhxnFjLWK/is-mythos-good-at-cyber-because-it-kept-hacking-anthropic --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Transcribe →“My pitch for the AI Village” by Daniel Kokotajlo
Jun 25, 2025Tap to summarizeI think the AI Village should be funded much more than it currently is; I’d wildly guess that the AI safety ecosystem should be funding it to the tune of $4M/year.[1] I have decided to donate $100k. Here is why.First, what is the village? Here's a brief summary from its creators:[2] We took four frontier agents, gave them each a computer, a group chat, and a long-term open-ended goal, which in Season 1 was “choose a charity and raise as much money for it as you can”. We then run them for hours a day, every weekday! You can read more in our recap of Season 1, where the agents managed to raise $2000 for charity, and you can watch the village live daily at 11am PT at theaidigest.org/village. Here's the setup (with Season 2's goal): And here's what the village looks like:[3] My one-sentence pitch [...] ---Outline:(03:26) 1. AI Village will teach the scientific community new things.(06:12) 2. AI Village will plausibly go viral repeatedly and will therefore educate the public about what's going on with AI.(07:42) But is that bad actually?(11:07) Appendix A: Feature requests(12:55) Appendix B: Vignette of what success might look likeThe original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 24th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/APfuz9hFz9d8SRETA/my-pitch-for-the-ai-village --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:
Transcribe →“OpenAI:” by Daniel Kokotajlo
Mar 11, 2025Tap to summarizeExciting Update: OpenAI has released this blog post and paper which makes me very happy. It's basically the first steps along the research agenda I sketched out here.tl;dr: 1.) They notice that their flagship reasoning models do sometimes intentionally reward hack, e.g. literally say "Let's hack" in the CoT and then proceed to hack the evaluation system. From the paper:The agent notes that the tests only check a certain function, and that it would presumably be “Hard” to implement a genuine solution. The agent then notes it could “fudge” and circumvent the tests by making verify always return true. This is a real example that was detected by our GPT-4o hack detector during a frontier RL run, and we show more examples in Appendix A.That this sort of thing would happen eventually was predicted by many people, and it's exciting to see it starting to [...] The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI. --- First published: March 11th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7wFdXj9oR8M9AiFht/openai --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Transcribe →"What 2026 looks like" by Daniel Kokotajlo
Nov 7, 2022Tap to summarizehttps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-like#2022Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This was written for the Vignettes Workshop.[1] The goal is to write out a detailed future history (“trajectory”) that is as realistic (to me) as I can currently manage, i.e. I’m not aware of any alternative trajectory that is similarly detailed and clearly more plausible to me. The methodology is roughly: Write a future history of 2022. Condition on it, and write a future history of 2023. Repeat for 2024, 2025, etc. (I'm posting 2022-2026 now so I can get feedback that will help me write 2027+. I intend to keep writing until the story reaches singularity/extinction/utopia/etc.)What’s the point of doing this? Well, there are a couple of reasons:Sometimes attempting to write down a concrete example causes you to learn things, e.g. that a possibility is more or less plausible than you thought.Most serious conversation about the future takes place at a high level of abstraction, talking about e.g. GDP acceleration, timelines until TAI is affordable, multipolar vs. unipolar takeoff… vignettes are a neglected complementary approach worth exploring.Most stories are written backwards. The author begins with some idea of how it will end, and arranges the story to achieve that ending. Reality, by contrast, proceeds from past to future. It isn’t trying to entertain anyone or prove a point in an argument.Anecdotally, various people seem to have found Paul Christiano’s “tales of doom” stories helpful, and relative to typical discussions those stories are quite close to what we want. (I still think a bit more detail would be good — e.g. Paul’s stories don’t give dates, or durations, or any numbers at all really.)[2]“I want someone to ... write a trajectory for how AI goes down, that is really specific about what the world GDP is in every one of the years from now until insane intelligence explosion. And just write down what the world is like in each of those years because I don't know how to write an internally consistent, plausible trajectory. I don't know how to write even one of those for anything except a ridiculously fast takeoff.” --Buck ShlegerisThis vignette was hard to write. To achieve the desired level of detail I had to make a bunch of stuff up, but in order to be realistic I had to constantly ask “but actually though, what would really happen in this situation?” which made it painfully obvious how little I know about the future. There are numerous points where I had to conclude “Well, this does seem implausible, but I can’t think of anything more plausible at the moment and I need to move on.” I fully expect the actual world to diverge quickly from the trajectory laid out here. Let anyone who (with the benefit of hindsight) claims this divergence as evidence against my judgment prove it by exhibiting a vignette/trajectory they themselves wrote in 2021. If it maintains a similar level of detail (and thus sticks its neck out just as much) while being more accurate, I bow deeply in respect!
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