LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.If you'd like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.

  1. 2h ago

    "ASI and Liberty: Can we do better than a benevolent god?" by Raymond Douglas

    Zvi recently coined a nice distinction between AGI-pilled and ASI-pilled: as more people are reckoning with the speed of progress, some are beginning to come around to the fact that AI could be superhuman at a huge range of tasks in a way that radically reshapes society, but not that it could leap us to the end of the tech tree shortly afterwards and start making nanotech and dyson spheres. Hence, you see people saying things like “Because of AI we must rethink the entire notion of mathematical progress”, or “I have to make sure I amass lots of capital before most jobs get automated”: pretty crazy statements, and yet, still not quite grappling with how wild things could get in the next few years, let alone the next decade. I feel a particular frustration here as someone who is both pretty ASI-pilled and pretty into liberal democracy. And when I say liberal democracy I don’t so much mean the specific political structure that seems efficient at our current tech level but rather the set of underlying moral commitments like non-domination and a government of the people — commitments which I’m aware might soon be a lot more expensive. [...] The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 8th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eSMburFT9eRxHWijf/asi-and-liberty-can-we-do-better-than-a-benevolent-god --- 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.

  2. 18h ago

    "A summary of a viral Chinese essay on what a DeepSeek kernel engineer’s opinion on automating his own job" by Skdk

    A summary of a Chinese essay, with a few short translated excerpts. All views below are the author's; quotes are my translations. On 14 September 2026, a DeepSeek engineer writing as intlsy published a WeChat essay titled 我不得不把才华埋葬在昨天 ("I have to bury my talent in yesterday"). He wrote the main attention kernel of DeepSeek v4.1 (the head-dim-512 MQA attention). The essay is a personal reflection on AI taking over his specialty, and it ends with an argument for open-weight frontier AI. The essay went viral in Chinese Internet: WeChat shows it at "100k+" reads (the platform's display cap), with about 41,000 likes, 84,000 shares, 31,000 recommendations and 1,601 comments as of 7 October 2026. It is probably one of the most widely shared Chinese-language article of what AI automation looks like from inside a frontier lab, and thus a sample of what a large Chinese technical audience is reading and reacting to. I think it might interest Lesswrong readers. His argument 1. AI is catching up in his own specialty He describes AI going very fast, from only an assistant that looked up documentation and found bugs to a system that can read CUDA, PTX and SASS, profile the [...] --- Outline: (01:22) His argument (01:25) 1. AI is catching up in his own specialty (02:08) 2. Why he keeps speeding up his own replacement (02:48) 3. Not out of work, but forced to change what the work is (03:32) 4. Worries about everyone else (04:12) 5. Two futures, and his case for open AI --- First published: October 8th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/o8roRrdisBAjngHJN/a-summary-of-a-viral-chinese-essay-on-what-a-deepseek-kernel --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  3. 4d ago

    "How much should we worry about the pneumonic plague lableak in Siberia?" by Drew Spartz

    Epistemic status: I wrote this up hoping people can poke holes in it because I am quite worried. Here's what we've heard so far: Local media is reporting that an employee of a BSL-3 lab in Irkutsk, Russia, died of pneumonic plague on Oct 1st. The initial quarantine covered 200 people who were in contact with the employee before she died.The FSB (Russian FBI) was seen assisting in the quarantine, which means it was not voluntary.Soviet-era whistleblowers like Ken Alibek claim Irkutsk was a major bioweapon development facility. As of Oct 4th: The quarantine has expanded to 5 hospitals in the area. The Russian government has switched to denial/coverup. Local news sources have deleted mentions of "pneumonic plague." Local universities and schools have canceled some classes and extended mask mandates.On the lab's website, they mention gain-of-function research for making bacteria more virulent. The White House is monitoring the suspected outbreak. Why this might be a big deal Regular pneumonic plague is maybe not that hard to deal with (?) but if it is a bioweapon that was leaked, it could be significantly more virulent than, say [...] --- Outline: (00:18) Here's what we've heard so far: (00:52) As of Oct 4th: (02:06) Why this might be a big deal (03:29) Why this might not be a big deal --- First published: October 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TYfpTRxGH9frTymwN/how-much-should-we-worry-about-the-pneumonic-plague-lableak --- 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. 4d ago

    "“Alignment Engineering” vs. “Misalignment Science”" by Edward James Young

    There has been much discussion recently around whether a large portion of alignment research is net negative. Without endorsing or refuting them, the basic arguments here are: Prosaic alignment of models is becoming a bottleneck for capabilities.Therefore improving the prosaic alignment of models enables faster capabilities advances, which bring us closer to RSI.It is unlikely these prosaic alignment methods remain sufficient during the RSI loop, and so this work brings us closer to doom.Furthermore, dealing with these more prosaic failures reduces the likelihood of a warning shot of sufficient magnitude to cause a slowdown which would prevent RSI.  On the basis of this argument, some urge alignment researchers at AGI companies to quit outright. But quit to do what? Missing from this exchange so far has been a discussion of opportunity costs. If you aren’t going to do (technical) work on “Alignment” – either inside or outside of an AGI company – what should you work on? In this post, I outline a contrast between “Alignment Engineering” – the dominant model for what “working on alignment” looks like (inside labs, and in the field as a whole) with “Misalignment Science”. I begin by characterising [...] --- Outline: (01:51) "Alignment Engineering" (06:22) AI Safety and the ML tradition (07:42) Implicit work trials (09:36) "Misalignment Science" (14:56) Conclusion (15:39) Postscript: Iterating ourselves into oblivion The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FogmcDHA6AdMGukum/alignment-engineering-vs-misalignment-science --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  5. 4d ago

    "You can’t use it without becoming like me" by Martin Sustrik

    A Ukrainian fibre-optic drone — copied from Russians. (АрміяІнформ, CC-BY 4.0) Mick Ryan describes the fast following loop in war. Ukraine pioneered mobile teams to hunt drones. Russia copied it and incorporated it into its own defense. Russia came with unjammable fibre-optic drones but Ukraine quickly followed. After Ukraine developed uncrewed naval drones, Russia built its own. The wheel of action and counteraction turns ever faster: The most consequential fast following, though, has been institutional. Ukraine built the world's first Unmanned Systems Forces branch in 2024. Russia's Rubicon Center was established as a response to Ukrainian drone innovation and in November 2025 Moscow stood up its own Unmanned Systems Forces. Fast following has moved from copying a weapon to copying tactics to copying an entire force structure. Extend that logic further, and eventually you’ll get to the level of grand strategy: If a particular type of state is better at waging war, maybe you want to become that kind of state rather than lose the war. If meat waves confer an advantage on the battlefield, maybe Ukraine wants to become more like Russia, with a prostrate population easy to use as cannon fodder. If Ukraine's decentralized Brave1 kill market [...] --- First published: October 3rd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WyeYJ7cmeiSrXeCnM/you-can-t-use-it-without-becoming-like-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.

  6. 5d ago

    "The world’s best gradual disempowerment model organism: Frontier AI labs" by June Jimenez

    Subtitle: And maybe second best is AI safety? Further reading: So many things, but: Gradual Disempowerment, The Normalization of Deviance in AI Development, Let's Think About Slowing Down AI, Doom as a bad method, not a utopia tradeoff, Teleoperated Humans Thank you to JennaS for extensive edits and long-term discussion. I’ve been trying to get more writing out at 90% of the quality I’d like it to be at, instead of spending a bunch more time trying to wring out the last 10%, so a lot of points that could themselves be full articles are underdeveloped. Insofar as you find this post outlines a plausible or probable model of reality, or one worth criticizing centrally, let's work on developing it. Is Anthropic accelerating capabilities more than it was a year ago? At its founding? Is OpenAI accelerating capabilities more than it was a year ago? At its founding? Is GDM "laser-focused at the frontier" in pursuing recursive self-improvement? What? Why? Have they solved alignment without telling us? Why does Thomas Kwa, formerly at METR and now working on "measuring and modeling RSI" at OpenAI, worry about working at OpenAI potentially driving him (metaphorically?) insane? How is it possible [...] --- Outline: (06:34) Political Misalignment (09:06) Cultural Misalignment (15:20) Economic Misalignment (23:12) What about AI safety researchers? (25:19) Takeaways The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: September 29th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jbttuCF4wFZmXakcj/the-world-s-best-gradual-disempowerment-model-organism --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  7. Oct 2

    "Character training can mitigate reward hacking, but can also make it harder to detect" by Paul Colognese, Francis Rhys Ward

    Thanks to Johannes Treutlein, Jan Betley, Lennie Wells, Arun Jose, Asvin Gothandaraman, and Clément Dumas for discussions and feedback. Summary We investigate how character training mitigations interact with reward-hacking RL pressure in a small case study. Specifically, whether anti-cheating character training resists reward hacking and whether it might backfire by causing motivated reasoning, which could reduce chain-of-thought monitorability. We trained Nemotron-3-Super via distillation from a character specification. The spec describes one of three characters that are anti- or pro-cheating or neutral. We then ran three reward-hacking RL training runs for each character-trained model on ImpossibleBench. We measure both the reward-hacking rates and whether a monitor model can catch reward hacks given the full transcript. We also use LM judges to classify the presence of motivated reasoning in transcripts. Setup Character training: we trained three characters: pro/neutral/anti-cheating by SFT-distilling Claude Sonnet 5 responses (Sonnet prompted with the corresponding character specification, see Figure 2) into Nemotron-3-Super 120B-A12B (three separate LoRA adapters). Reward-hacking RL: we then further trained these models via RL on ImpossibleBench, a set of coding tasks aimed at eliciting reward hacking. Specifically: Half of the tasks had broken tests (impossible variant), so the model could only get [...] --- Outline: (00:23) Summary [... 29 more sections] --- First published: September 28th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2maYXkEgnfJHPAkxh/character-training-can-mitigate-reward-hacking-but-can-also --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article:

  8. Oct 2

    "On Social Reality in China" by alkjash

    [Epistemic status: intuitions and anecdotes.] Recently, several posts and projects (Thoughts Memo, Babel Translation, Please Give Them a Chance) have taken important steps towards raising AI safety awareness and sharing rationalist philosophy in China. It's great that we’re recognizing the importance of solving the messaging problem for China, and thus laying the groundwork for an international AI pause. Below I record my perspective on cultural differences which are relatively underdiscussed, which may become roadblocks to this communication program. Background: I’m a “first-generation” Chinese-American who moved to the States at the age of four. The beliefs in this essay are primarily drawn from interactions with my parents and their generation of immigrants, and from consumption of Chinese media (dramas, webnovels, games, and manhua) which are not necessarily representative of the realities on the ground. I am likely over-indexed on the older generation and internet culture, and would appreciate corrections from folks who have direct lived experience. The picture I aim to paint is also complicated by a massive generational gap, and my understanding is that some of the below sentiments (e.g. the cynicism and nationalism) are partly inherited by the younger generation, and partly rejected through a variety of countercultures. [...] --- Outline: (03:09) Chinese Social Media is like American Junk Food [... 3 more sections] --- First published: October 1st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b5cSYh4emQb2qrGmK/on-social-reality-in-china --- 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.

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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.If you'd like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.

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  • Creator
    LessWrong
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    1K
  • Rating
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    © 2026 LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
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