LessWrong posts by zvi

zvi
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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi

  1. 17H AGO

    “Medical Roundup #5” by Zvi

    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 ensure that stays funded, either via investment or grants. As for mRNA, please do what you can to help save it, so we can keep getting more headlines like ‘a new cancer vaccine just wiped out tumors’ even if it is sufficiently early that the sentence this time inevitably concludes ‘IN MICE.’ Heart Disease Wait, what, you’re saying we might soon ‘mostly defeat’ heart disease? Cremieux: It's hard to oversell how big a discovery this is. Heart disease is America's #1 cause of death. With a combination of two drugs administered once every six months, it might be mostly defeated. Just think about that how big this is! You will know your great-grandkids! [...] --- Outline: (00:34) Heart Disease (02:16) Alcohol (05:21) Legal Reforms (06:24) Embryo Selection and Gene Editing (15:02) GLP-1s Work (18:57) There Is No Catch Other Than Availability And Price (22:54) The Societal Impact of GLP-1s (25:40) I'm Not a Yo-Yo (26:24) Back Problems Are An Underrated Reason To Lose Weight (27:18) No One Knows Much About Nutrition (29:23) Ketogenic Diets Can Go Very Wrong (36:01) Weight Loss The Hard Way (36:36) We Ask Far Too Much Of Satiety (39:28) Supplements (41:07) A Cure For Some Depression (42:16) Assisted Suicide (43:17) Bioethics Delenda Est (45:05) Ignorance Can Be Bliss (45:48) Living Forever In Your Apartment (46:51) In Other Health News --- First published: October 6th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DqK7TaH2drLxGiKcb/medical-roundup-5 --- 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.

    50 min

  2. 3D AGO

    “Sora and The Big Bright Screen Slop Machine” by Zvi

    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? Great, love it. The part where they gave us a new social network dedicated purely to short form AI videos? Not great, Bob. Don’t be evil. OpenAI is claiming they are making their social network with an endless scroll of 10-second AI videos the Actively Good, pro-human version of The Big Bright Screen Slop Machine, that helps you achieve your goals and can be easily customized and favors connection and so on. I am deeply skeptical. They also took a bold copyright stance, with that stance being, well, not quite ‘f*** you,’ but kind of close? You are welcome to start flagging individual videos. Or you can complain to them more generally about your characters and they say they can [...] --- Outline: (01:42) Act 1: Sora 2, The Producer of Ten Second Videos (03:08) Big Talk (06:00) Failures of Physics (06:45) Fun With Media Generation (09:19) Act 2: Copyright Confrontation (09:25) Imitation Learning (12:50) OpenAI In Copyright Infringement (14:25) OpenAI Gives Copyright Holders The Finger (22:36) State Of The Copyright Game (23:44) Not Safe For Pliny (25:46) Act 3: The Big Bright Screen Slop Machine (25:58) The Vibes Are Off (27:30) I Have An Idea, Let's Moral Panic (33:08) OpenAI's Own Live Look At Their New App (34:11) When Everyone Is Creative No One Will Be (36:51) Nobody Wants This (39:25) Okay Maybe Somebody Wants This? (40:22) Sora Sora What's It Good For? (42:31) The Vibes Are Even Worse (43:35) No I Mean How Is It Good For OpenAI? (46:15) Don't Worry It's The Good Version (49:03) Optimize For Long Term User Satisfaction (50:59) Encourage Users To Control Their Feed (56:20) Prioritize Creation (57:09) Help Users Achieve Their Long Term Goals (58:10) Prioritize Connection (58:52) Alignment Test (59:27) One Strike (01:00:50) Don't Be Evil (01:05:29) No Escape --- First published: October 3rd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DKXa42nu2SDnWWmeW/sora-and-the-big-bright-screen-slop-machine --- 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.

    1h 7m

  3. 4D AGO

    “AI #136: A Song and Dance” by Zvi

    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, and then a second post on capabilities. It is a very good model, likely the current best model for most coding tasks, most agentic and computer use tasks, and quick or back-and-forth chat conversations. GPT-5 still has a role to play as well. There was also the dance, also known as Sora, both the new and improved 10-second AI video generator Sora and also the new OpenAI social network Sora. I will be covering that tomorrow. The video generator itself seems amazingly great. The social network sounds like a dystopian nightmare and I like to think Nobody Wants This, although I do not yet have access nor am I a typical customer of such products. The copyright decisions being [...] --- Outline: (02:52) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility (04:24) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility (06:53) Huh, Upgrades (09:46) On Your Marks (18:02) Choose Your Fighter (22:36) Copyright Confrontation (25:35) Fun With Media Generation (27:02) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon (34:06) You Drive Me Crazy (35:12) Parental Controls (35:59) They Took Our Jobs (42:23) The Art of the Jailbreak (43:25) Introducing (49:16) In Other AI News (50:49) Show Me the Money (55:19) Quiet Speculations (01:03:15) The Quest for Sane Regulations (01:05:11) Chip City (01:07:15) The Week in Audio (01:07:55) If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (01:12:55) Rhetorical Innovation (01:16:36) Messages From Janusworld (01:22:54) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult (01:23:40) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone (01:26:18) The Lighter Side --- First published: October 2nd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZE2Hztfvk7xKrzBk/ai-136-a-song-and-dance --- 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.

    1h 27m

  4. 5D AGO

    “Claude Sonnet 4.5 Is A Very Good Model” by Zvi

    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 announcement. Yesterday I covered the model card and related alignment concerns. Today's post covers the capabilities side. We don’t currently have a new Opus, but Mike Krieger confirmed one is being worked on for release later this year. For Opus 4.5, my request is to give us a second version that gets minimal or no RL, isn’t great at coding, doesn’t use tools well except web search, doesn’t work as an agent or for computer use and so on, and if you ask it for those things it suggests you hand your task off to its technical friend or does so on your behalf. I do my best to include all substantive reactions I’ve seen, positive and negative, because right after model [...] --- Outline: (01:14) Big Talk (02:53) The Big Takeaways (04:55) On Your Marks (09:25) Huh, Upgrades (13:08) The System Prompt (20:31) Positive Reactions Curated By Anthropic (23:13) Other Systematic Positive Reactions (27:24) Anecdotal Positive Reactions (32:02) Anecdotal Negative Reactions (40:57) Claude Enters Its Non-Sycophantic Era (42:28) So Emotional (48:25) Early Days --- First published: October 1st, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/spQh5JfWXqTE5x5Wi/claude-sonnet-4-5-is-a-very-good-model --- 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.

    49 min

  5. 6D AGO

    “Claude Sonnet 4.5: System Card and Alignment” by Zvi

    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 while I learn more, I am defaulting to it as my new primary model for queries short of GPT-5-Pro level. I’ll cover the system card and alignment concerns first, then cover capabilities and reactions tomorrow once everyone has had another day to play with the new model. It was great to recently see the collaboration between OpenAI and Anthropic where they evaluated each others’ models. I would love to see this incorporated into model cards going forward, where GPT-5 was included in Anthropic's system cards as a comparison point, and Claude was included in OpenAI's. Basic Alignment Facts About Sonnet 4.5 Anthropic: Overall, we find that Claude Sonnet 4.5 has a substantially improved safety profile compared to previous Claude models. [...] --- Outline: (01:36) Basic Alignment Facts About Sonnet 4.5 (03:54) 2.1: Single Turn Tests and 2.2: Ambiguous Context Evaluations (05:01) 2.3. and 2.4: Multi-Turn Testing (07:00) 2.5: Bias (08:56) 3: Honesty (10:26) 4: Agentic Safety (10:41) 4.1: Malicious Agentic Coding (13:01) 4.2: Prompt Injections Within Agentic Systems (15:05) 5: Cyber Capabilities (17:35) 5.3: Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) Cyber Tests (22:15) 6: Reward Hacking (26:47) 7: Alignment (28:11) Situational Awareness (33:38) Test Design (36:32) Evaluation Awareness (42:57) 7.4: Evidence From Training And Early Use (43:55) 7.5: Risk Area Discussions (45:26) It's Sabotage (50:48) Interpretability Investigations (58:35) 8: Model Welfare Assessment (58:54) 9: RSP (Responsible Scaling Policy) Evaluations (59:51) Keep Sonnet Safe --- First published: September 30th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4yn8B8p2YiouxLABy/claude-sonnet-4-5-system-card-and-alignment --- 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.

    1h 1m

  6. SEP 29

    “On Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast With Richard Sutton” by Zvi

    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 not find of note are skipped. The main part of each point is descriptive of what is said, by default paraphrased. For direct quotes I will use quote marks, by default this is Sutton. Nested statements are my own commentary. Timestamps are approximate and from his hosted copy, not the YouTube version, in this case I didn’t bother because the section divisions in the transcript should make this very easy to follow without them. Full transcript of the episode is here if you want to verify exactly what was said. Well, that was the plan. This turned largely into me quoting Sutton and then expressing my mind boggling. A lot of what was interesting [...] --- Outline: (01:21) Sutton Says LLMs Are Not Intelligent And Don't Do Anything (13:51) Humans Do Imitation Learning (19:35) The Experimental Paradigm (23:45) Current Architectures Generalize Poorly Out Of Distribution (28:36) Surprises In The AI Field (30:01) Will The Bitter Lesson Apply After AGI? (34:18) Succession To AI --- First published: September 29th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fpcRpBKBZavumySoe/on-dwarkesh-patel-s-podcast-with-richard-sutton --- 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.

    42 min

  7. SEP 26

    “Economics Roundup #6” by Zvi

    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 that is not time sensitive for updates like this one. Trade is Bad Good We love trade now, so maybe it’ll all turn out great? John Burn-Murdoch: Negative partisanship is a helluva drug: Up until a few months ago, liberal and conservative Americans held pretty much the same views on free trade. Now, not so much… Yet another explanation that says ‘the China shock killed particular jobs but had large diffuse benefits and left us all much better off.’ In other trade is good news, Argentina under the crazy libertarian Melei is now growing at 5.8%, faster than China. The Laffer Curve Alex Recouso: The recent capital gains tax increase in the UK [...] --- Outline: (00:20) Trade is Bad Good (01:16) The Laffer Curve (02:06) Surge Pricing (03:29) Important Safety Tip (06:35) An Orgy of Tax Evasion (06:55) Work It (07:14) Labor Share of Productivity Gains (08:09) Paycheck to Paycheck (10:40) Buy, Borrow, Die (11:17) The Sacred Revenue Number (11:38) Fool Me Once (12:11) To Their Credit (13:19) Incentives of Real Estate Agents (16:16) Price Discrimination (18:09) Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics (21:31) Minimum Wage (22:57) The Cost Of Minimally Living (24:56) Buy My Business (27:21) GDP Should Count All The Spending (28:21) Where We Are Going With All This --- First published: September 26th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9HaoJfTerhkae7Sbo/economics-roundup-6 --- 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.

    29 min

  8. SEP 25

    “AI #135: OpenAI Shows Us The Money” by Zvi

    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 Stargate. They are not kidding around when it comes to scale. They’re going to need it, as they are announcing soon a slate of products that takes inference costs to the next level. After a full review and two reaction posts, I’ve now completed my primary coverage of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. The book is now a NYT bestseller, #7 in combined print and e-books nonfiction and #8 in hardcover fiction. I will of course cover any important developments from here but won’t be analyzing reviews and reactions by default. We also had a conference of economic papers on AI, which were interesting throughout about particular aspects of AI economics, even though they predictably did not take future AI [...] --- Outline: (01:15) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility (04:09) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility (07:35) Huh, Upgrades (08:43) On Your Marks (14:13) Choose Your Fighter (16:52) Get My Agent On The Line (17:27) Antisocial Media (17:55) Copyright Confrontation (18:57) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon (19:49) Fun With Media Generation (20:39) Unprompted Attention (22:16) They Took Our Jobs (30:42) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (33:38) The Art of the Jailbreak (35:05) Get Involved (35:19) In Other AI News (36:10) Glass Houses (39:46) Show Me the Money (41:30) Quiet Speculations (50:24) Call For Action At The UN (55:02) The Quest for Sane Regulations (01:01:25) Chip City (01:05:14) The Week in Audio (01:05:23) Rhetorical Innovation (01:10:12) Google Strengthens Its Safety Framework (01:11:03) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult (01:23:02) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone (01:25:32) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone --- First published: September 25th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P5ZuoCwGCZyecBxeN/ai-135-openai-shows-us-the-money --- 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.

    1h 26m
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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts by zvi

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  • Creator
    zvi
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2025
  • Episodes
    250
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 All rights reserved
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    LessWrong posts by zvi

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