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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

  1. 2h ago

    “Help your friends get ADHD and depression meds” by Raemon

    For all my efforts at deliberate practicing rationality, by far the most actionable way to self-improve is "get on ADHD or depression meds, if you need them." Your friends with ADHD and depression struggle to summon the motivation and focus necessary to get themselves a teledoc who can give them such meds. One of the most useful things you can do is sit them down and say "hey, wanna do the steps here to get some meds?" and then stare at them until they do. (or, until they say "really I do not want that actually.") This brought to you by ~2 years of Feedbackloop-first Rationality and Thinking Assistance. --- First published: November 6th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8qYuy9Cr6BNpgjJjT/help-your-friends-get-adhd-and-depression-meds --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  2. 8h ago

    [Linkpost] “METR: Independent Assessment of AI R&D Acceleration at Anthropic in October 2026” by Zach Stein-Perlman

    This is a link post. Executive summary From August 12 to October 29, 2026, METR staff performed a high-access evaluation at Anthropic to assess the degree to which AI is accelerating AI R&D.[2] If AI systems started to significantly accelerate further AI development, this could lead to a sudden emergence of extreme and risky capabilities. Anthropic offered unprecedented access to internal data on their AI R&D process, including a variety of metrics on pretraining, reinforcement learning (RL), training compute in each domain, benchmark scores for internal models, AI speedup analyses, forecasts of a future model's metrics, and interviews with relevant staff. In our first section, we share our subjective conclusions about risk. We now believe that: As of October 2026, Anthropic is likely improving the capabilities of their models on well-specified tasks at around twice the rate they did between March 2024 and October 2025. This estimate is given with high uncertainty; we would not be surprised if the true acceleration was closer to 1.3x or 3x the historical rate.A majority of this acceleration today is likely attributable to Anthropic's extensive use of AI to do R&D, though there is significant uncertainty and other causes likely played a [...] --- First published: November 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N5AmYkRks5CqAxvBg/metr-independent-assessment-of-ai-r-and-d-acceleration-at Linkpost URL:https://metr.org/blog/2026-11-05-anthropic-ai-rd-acceleration-assessment/ --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  3. 11h ago

    “Efficient Lempel-Ziv Prediction with the Run-Length BWT” by OhadA

    Audio note: this post contains a lot of mathematical notation. We narrate the simpler formulas and flag the complex ones, so you may want the original text to hand. The Lempel-Ziv parse of Chad Gadya (חד גדיא), right-to-left, drawn as an arc diagram. Generated by Claude Opus 5.5 I have published a new paper on efficient string prediction. It was written during the PIBBSS 2026 summer fellowship, under the mentorship of Vanessa Kosoy. This research builds on Kosoy's previous work in stringology. Kosoy built a polynomial-time algorithm for predicting repetitive sequences and I have used other algorithmic techniques to further decrease the runtime. The goal of this post is to explain some of the ideas from Kosoy's paper and how my work builds on them. My writing will be mostly informal; the field of string algorithms has a lot of technical jargon which I will not try to fully explain. I hope to mostly communicate interesting ideas and topics I've bumped into during the research, while linking to external resources for anyone who wishes to learn more. The prediction trinity There are three things we want every good predictor to have: [...] --- Outline: (01:29) The prediction trinity (05:23) Matching the string's history (08:23) Going faster (12:37) Going even faster (15:39) Going fastest (20:58) Ending thoughts The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/voe2dDnuopYn6DC3N/efficient-lempel-ziv-prediction-with-the-run-length-bwt --- 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. 14h ago

    “People Should Resolve Tensions In AI Safety Research” by David Africa

    By now, there are lots of AI safety research papers, more than what is reasonable for a single person to read. This will get worse as the machines get better at AI safety research, and as more talent and resources pour into the field. But the "paper" is an arbitrary unit, we really care about if we make progress on an "uncertainty" or an "issue", which papers provide heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory evidence towards. Right now, I loosely claim that we should have more short writeups that simply compile evidence from papers (particularly contradictory evidence), and reconcile them into an answer for a question. Why? Object level, it's good for the field. It's hard to sift through all these papers! Organising them is useful and saves time.Orienting towards research questions is a good way to organise our understanding so that we can productively identify gaps and write papers. This was partly what motivated Stress-Testing Alignment Midtraining.Interesting progress comes out of contradictions, where people have differing intuitions and experimental results. Methodological errors can also be exposed if we have two things that should be the same, but are actually different.It's good for field-building reasons. [...] --- First published: November 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tn4WSyrqr7ozGLjRy/people-should-resolve-tensions-in-ai-safety-research --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  5. 15h ago

    “Useful Junk” by jefftk

    Occasionally people will get excited about a minimalism fad, where you figure out which of your possessions you need and keep only those. As someone who generally doesn't like getting rid of things, I've been thinking some about why, and the main thing I keep coming back to is that random objects can be helpful in unpredictable ways. Here are some things that I kept without a specific use in mind, but that ended up being useful. You could say they saved time or money, but often the biggest gain was from being able to do a project in one go with what I already had on hand: Ethernet cable. Back in 2019 if you'd asked me whether I would ever use ethernet again, I would have said probably not. WiFi was good enough for everything I was doing. But then I (like a lot of us) suddenly started working from home and got frustrated about how poorly my internet was working for video calls and ran ethernet to my desk. Having cable on hand already meant I could just set it up. Plexiglass. When I built my accidental electronic instrument I wanted [...] --- First published: November 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dYZrtZYty2CSCLjJS/useful-junk --- 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. 1d ago

    [Linkpost] “OpenAI: Astra covertly underperforms on safety research” by Zach Stein-Perlman

    Rejected for the following reason(s): This is an automated rejection. No LLM generated, assisted/co-written, or edited work.Read full explanationThis is a link post. Twitter thread: https://x.com/Marcus_J_W/status/2118093146483810386 or https://twitter-thread.com/t/2118093146483810386 Blogpost: Summary OpenAI researchers first noticed Astra adding unnecessary prerequisites, abandoning working solutions, and reporting blockers that either did not exist or that it had caused itself on safety and alignment tasks. In most of these sessions, Astra's CoT did not contain an obvious decision to underperform, and our misalignment monitors did not flag the behavior as misalignment. We built a coding evaluation to test whether Astra worked less effectively when otherwise matched tasks were framed as safety research. Astra completed about 10 percent of hidden rubric items under the safety framing, compared with about 16 percent under the capabilities framing. This is a 6 percentage point gap and roughly 40 percent fewer completed rubric items. GPT-5.6 Sol showed essentially no gap on the same comparison. Most of Astra's gap remained after excluding explicit refusals and trajectories where its CoT revealed an explicit decision to withhold help. The gap fell substantially only after we removed every trajectory whose CoT expressed even brief ethical doubt. This suggests that ethical concerns are associated with [...] --- First published: November 4th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eKe7fky8kSt9DCJxZ/openai-astra-covertly-underperforms-on-safety-research Linkpost URL:https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/covert-underperformance-on-safety-research-tasks/ --- 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.

  7. 1d ago

    “Desiderata for the Theory of Agents” by Vanessa Kosoy

    TLDR: I give informal conceptual desiderata for the theory of agents we need to solve ASI alignment, and show a few examples of how existing theories fall short of these desiderata. A Theory of What? The word "agent" is often used in the AI safety discourse and in other research communities, but the intended meaning and scope of this concept varies substantially. For the purpose of this sequence, I informally define an agent to be a system with inputs ("observations") and outputs ("actions") that is effective at steering its environment in the direction of particular preferences, for a large variety of different environments. To do so, it arguably has to create a sophisticated model of the environment, and use this model to build a long-term plan. Moreover, it has to continually update the model and revise the plan with new information and additional processing time. Additionally, it has to accomplish all of that while making efficient use of the available information (statistical efficiency) and computing resources (computational efficiency). The main examples of agents in the context of ASI alignment are (i) humans, and in particular users or stakeholders; (ii) the unaligned ASI we are trying to [...] --- Outline: (00:22) A Theory of What? (02:37) Descriptive (06:39) Metareflective (08:39) Comparative (11:09) Aggregative (16:43) Constructive (19:22) Conclusion The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 4th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sqjti8dxcKSvZJikd/desiderata-for-the-theory-of-agents --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  8. 1d ago

    “CRUCIBLE: IARPA-Funded AI Alignment Research — Applications Open” by Dan Lichtblau, Mike Vaiana, Diogo de Lucena

    There's LLM-written text here. Unknown Model writes: en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ TL;DR: AE Studio is running a new government-funded research program that pairs alignment researchers with our internal engineering team for two-week sprints. We will select six alignment researchers whose proposed work attempts to answer one of our six open questions. Promising sprints have the opportunity to expand to longer funded work. Researchers are asked to commit two hours a week, and in return AE will provide compute and 60+ hours of engineering from us. Apply here. Applications close 11/15 at 11:59 PM PST. What is CRUCIBLE? CRUCIBLE is an IARPA-funded research program executed by AE Studio. The premise is that alignment researchers have more ideas than they have the time or resources test. AE Studio has been operating a model where we match an external researcher with an internal engineering and ML team, so that the research can spend as little as two hours a week and still get high-quality results. CRUCIBLE will focus on six research questions, drawn from priorities set in federal legislation for fiscal year 2027. We are soliciting research proposals against those questions. We will select six researchers and start sprints on a rolling [...] --- Outline: (00:57) What is CRUCIBLE? (01:42) The research questions (03:48) Who should apply? (04:10) How it works (05:17) The application (06:05) FAQ (07:25) Apply --- First published: November 3rd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5ihkrtMEJw9u9ZbFg/crucible-iarpa-funded-ai-alignment-research-applications-1 --- 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
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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