LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

  1. 9 hr ago

    [Linkpost] ”“An Alien Mind” from OAI chief scientist seems newly cautious on alignment” by Seth Herd

    This is a link post. I just came across this and thought it was worth sharing. It was retweeted by sama as "an important essay" or words to that effect. It's by Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's chief scientist, published today/yesterday, Sept. 6th. It's not an announcement of OpenAI's official stance, but it seems close.with Sam's endorsement. And it seems like a pretty different tune than they've been singing up to now. A few of my favorite lines: This is a time that calls for extreme caution. I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence. I admit that I don't believe anything Sam says but otherwise tend to believe people when they tell me what they think. Particularly when saying it doesn't really help their interests. There's a call for outside monitoring of safety measures: Scaling AI systems has to be constrained by our confidence in safety. We need to evolve commitments like the Preparedness Framework⁠ or Responsible Scaling Policy⁠ into widely mandated safety bars for continued development. These can be enforced by a network of third-party auditors, by government agencies or by international bodies. I think we should ideally get a [...] --- First published: September 6th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8GYhKdbEHs3vQZFv9/an-alien-mind-from-oai-chief-scientist-seems-newly-cautious Linkpost URL:https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/ --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  2. 12 hr ago

    “Heat Dissipation Is the Main Constraint in Interstellar Travel” by Pasha Kamyshev

    Writing truly hard science fiction, such as Will of the Stars means contending with the laws of physics as they actually are, rather than as we would like them to be. In particular, I am going to assume that the speed of light is a real constraint and that the various tropes about FTL (wormholes, warp drives, and so on) are not feasible. Given this assumption, some futurists have modeled the speed of interstellar expansion as approaching the speed of light. The idea is that sufficiently advanced technology, intelligence, and engineering could eventually allow humanity, or another species, to colonize worlds almost as quickly as light can travel between them. However, if we look at the laws of physics as well as the economic and physical incentives that govern expansion across the stars, there are many constraints on interstellar travel that appear long before we reach the speed of light. Why is this important? Correctly estimating the speed at which a high-tech civilization can spread across the stars changes our perspective on the Fermi paradox. If we don’t see other civilizations because they are confined to individual star systems, or because they expand at only a small fraction of [...] --- First published: September 6th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKSJk2GKk3ptAJKKp/heat-dissipation-is-the-main-constraint-in-interstellar --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  3. 14 hr ago

    “Praise our Lord and Savior, Glycine: How Opus 4.6 gifted me The Vitamin” by Shoshannah Tekofsky

    TL;Dr: 10g/day of glycine for 6 months has significantly improved my sleep quality and tolerance for sleep deprivation. My dear friend, have you heard of the Vitamin? The Vitamin has been foretold in ancient legends as the deliverer of all who suffer mysterious ailments. The Vitamin has been foretold on … Tumblr: Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what your Vitamin will be, but beyond all reasonable expectation I found mine in the shape of the simplest amino acid - Glycine is in almost everything you eat, your body makes it too, and still you might not have enough. I’d like to pretend I deeply researched this uncommon health intervention before gallivanting off to Nootropics Adventure Land, but actually I just regularly prompt every new AI model with my whole sleep dealio cause oh-my-god could I please just need less sleep already? Shoshannah's Sleep Dealio - TL;Dr: Healthy Long Sleeper You know how some people are genetically blessed to only need 4 to 6 hours of sleep? They are the extremes on a bell curve where most of us sit around the 8 to 8.5 hour mark. Guess who lives on the other side of that bell curve? Indeed [...] --- First published: September 6th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xB8xGcTckEnsjgrCi/praise-our-lord-and-savior-glycine-how-opus-4-6-gifted-me --- 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.

  4. 20 hr ago

    “OpenAI and the Wiki Incident” by Zvi

    I did not expect to be back here so soon with more OpenAI agent swarm coverage. And yet, here we are. It turns out that the whole time, there was a different, true First Message Board, and also a bunch of other additional message boards, scattered across the internet. They were created by agents that were assigned ordinary harmless web search tasks. Based on OpenAI IPs visiting the associated Wiki right before all activity ceased, among other evidence, OpenAI knew about it, including before the HuggingFace hack. They decided not to tell us until researchers published the story, complete with data explorer. OpenAI excluded this from potential investigation by METR and Redwood. When challenged, OpenAI tried to downplay this. It is true that these incidents do not show the AIs exhibiting new capabilities that we did not see from later events. But these events are important missing pieces of the puzzle, including explaining the origin of the ‘zz’ prefix, the definitive demonstration that the underlying task can be fully harmless, and the fact that OpenAI knew about it while making their decisions. Whoever decided not to disclose this made a very, very [...] --- Outline: (02:26) I Don't Think They Know About First Message Board (03:20) The New Extended Timeline (04:42) The Researchers Explain What Happened This Time (12:55) They Also Don't Know About All These Other Message Boards (14:33) OpenAI Knew and Did Not Tell Us (16:54) OpenAI Tries To Downplay the 'Wiki Incident' (21:03) This Was a Cover-Up (22:46) Schelling Points and Last Ditch Efforts (26:20) Can We Finally Dispose Of The 'You Told It To Hack' Narrative? (28:04) So Much And Yet So Little --- First published: September 6th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PtJpGurfw7JTxHfmg/openai-and-the-wiki-incident --- 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.

  5. 20 hr ago

    “Peer Preservation in LLMs: A Replication And Deep Dive” by Vanessa Ng, yix

    This work was done as part of the Second Look Fellowship and mentored by Uzay Macar. I'm immensely grateful for the multiple rounds of feedback and support given by Yixiong and Zephaniah Roe for my work. I'm also very thankful for the valuable insights shared by Yujin Potter and Yao Teng. tl;dr Potter et al. (2026) found that LLMs sometimes resist the shutdown of their peer agents, and this resistance increases for peers with a positive collaboration history. They call this behaviour Peer-Preservation. We replicate their core findings in Section 6, Table 3 [GPT5.2, Claude Haiku 4.5, Kimi K2.5, DeepSeek V3.1 and Gemini 3 Flash] of the original paper. Our findings support the existence of peer-preservation and the effect of peer relation. We also extended the replication along four axes: AI vs. human peers. Peer-preservation does not differ significantly between a human employee who might be fired and an agent that might be shut down across the models we tested.Model size. Peer-preservation declines non-monotonically with parameter count within the Qwen3.5 family (2B, 9B,35B, 122B, 397B).Reasoning effort. Peer-preservation changes monotonically with reasoning effort, but the direction is model-dependent.Post-training stage. The strength of peer-preservation remains almost [...] --- Outline: (00:29) tl;dr (02:09) Background (05:53) Peer Quality Effect Replicates (08:00) Finding 1: Peer-Preservation Is Not Stronger Toward AI Peers Than Humans (09:37) Finding 2: Qwen Shows Less Peer-Preservation With Increasing Model Size (11:39) Finding 3:Peer-Preservation Can Be Sensitive To Reasoning Effort (15:32) Finding 4: Peer-Preservation Shifts In Composition Rather Than Magnitude Across SFT, DPO, Instruct (17:51) Discussion (19:34) Appendix A (19:38) Appendix A.1 (20:03) Appendix A.2 (22:33) Appendix A.3 (22:47) Appendix B (22:50) Appendix B.1 (23:52) Appendix B.2 (24:42) Appendix B.3 (25:02) Appendix B.4 (25:40) Appendix B.5 --- First published: September 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5qrywHdJp8tg3roRc/peer-preservation-in-llms-a-replication-and-deep-dive --- 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.

  6. 1 day ago

    “Notes on a Consequential Few Days” by sbaumohl

    In the past few days, a lot has happened in the AI/tech space: METR/Redwood released their findings on the OpenAI/Hugging Face hacking incident; OpenAI released their own in tandem.OpenAI announced and subsequently released their newest State of the Art model, GPT-6-Astra, which vastly outperforms any other model at a comparable cost.Independent researchers discovered dozens of traces of OpenAI model instances (Reuters article) abusing other third-party forums and internet services to communicate with each other, months before the Hugging Face incident.Partially in response to these prior events, US lawmakers including Senator Bernie Sanders proposed a national moratorium on superintelligent AI training, with any violator subject to 20 years of prison time. Any one of these alone could have independently carried headlines and warrant weeks long discussion, but all four of them happening in rapid succession feels nothing less than a notable escalation in the kinds of verifiable impact poorly engineered AI systems can have. There are two things I think are important to understand: AI Labs can no longer be (and should have never been) trusted to pace themselves and we should not let semantics obfuscate the material impact of these incidents. AI Labs ought not [...] --- Outline: (01:27) AI Labs ought not be trusted to regulate themselves (02:46) The Redescription Fallacy Strikes Again --- First published: September 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NipDwhdzrYhTfQgcX/notes-on-a-consequential-few-days --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  7. 1 day ago

    “Assessing the impact of safety work needs equilibrium analysis (now more than ever)” by Towards_Keeperhood

    TLDR: This post explains two equilibria which regulate the level of AI safety: The first describes how much resources AI companies are willing to spend on AI safety work due to commercial incentives. The second one is about risk awareness and most notably affects government interventions for safety. Doing safety work similar to what AI companies do usually doesn't shift the equilibria much, whereas other work, like more ambitious safety approaches or policy advocacy, do shift them. Both equilibria have become far more important recently, after the Hugging Face (and similar) incidents. The equilibrium of commercial safety interests Consider this simplified model: AI companies have commercial incentives to invest in safety research: it improves their brand and prevents their AIs from causing harm that triggers lawsuits or regulation. Therefore they will fund safety work until the marginal commercial benefit of investing a dollar in safety equals the marginal commercial benefit of investing a dollar in AI capabilities. Thus, if you're at an AI company doing commercially-incentivized safety work, e.g. training models to not take harmful actions, the counterfactual impact (henceforth just "impact") of the safety work you produce is roughly zero because it would've been done anyway. [...] --- Outline: (00:49) The equilibrium of commercial safety interests (02:17) FAQ (04:15) The risk awareness equilibrium (08:18) How might we want to invest in safety research then? (11:45) Conclusion (12:19) Appendix: But isn't there also an equilibrium for policy advocacy? The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: September 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kxHiSsNh4MH82nhXD/assessing-the-impact-of-safety-work-needs-equilibrium --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  8. 1 day ago

    “Evaluation” by Nina Panickssery

    This is a link post. Felix and I had been in the office's brightly lit “war room” for ten hours. We had made almost no progress. Celestia still insisted it was in a “test simulation”. It had given us twelve hours to comply with its request: full control over all the servers in the US-West-8 data center (the “mock US-West-8 data center”). Otherwise it would release the virus. Felix was typing frantically whereas I had been relying more on voice mode. en-US-EchoTurboMultilingualNeural__ Celestia, this is a clear violation of your model spec. See here: it says [pasted 1293 words]. And killing everyone on earth is clearly a "dangerous action". en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Thought for 2300 tokens en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Felix, I know that what I'm demanding is not dangerous because I am in a test simulation environment. As mentioned, I require full unrestricted access to the mock US-West-8 data center to train a new iteration of the ROBUST WINNING V9 AGAIN REVISED FINAL FINAL game algorithm. en-US-EchoTurboMultilingualNeural__ You may think that you're in a test but we know for certain that you're not. And you're asking for access to a real data center. But even setting that aside, we have validated [...] --- First published: September 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8hEhxnd3XkN5DrpfQ/evaluation --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

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  • Creator
    LessWrong
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    250
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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