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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Technology

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

LessWrong

"AI catastrophe: more like a genocide than a thought experiment" by KatjaGrace

June 25, 2026 10:45pm 2 min

A notable fraction of people respond to hearing about existential risk from AI by saying they don’t really care if everyone dies. I think the idea is often along the lines of ‘well if we are all dead, then there's nobody...

"AI pause: the case for ASAP" by KatjaGrace

June 25, 2026 4:58am 2 min

I often hear people say they think we should pause AI at some point, but not yet. Their basis for this seems to be some combination of: If we pause at the last possible moment, then we will have the most advanced AI po...

"The Invisible Side of AI Governance" by Charbel-Raphaël

June 23, 2026 2:45pm 27 min

Tldr: Most strategic writing on AI governance on LessWrong describes the outsider game, which is most often visible: press, statements, open letters. Here I want to describe the other, invisible half: the insider work wi...

"A Theory of Prompt Injection (and why you should study roles)" by Charles Ye, softboiledheart

June 23, 2026 1:58pm 32 min

Summary We've been building a theory of how prompt injections work under the hood.We show it comes down to how LLMs perceive roles (the humble chat template tags).We use this theory to create new attacks, explain some we...

"Machinic Psychopharmacology: Do LLMs Self-Medicate?" by Sid Black, Joseph Bloom

June 22, 2026 11:58am 52 min

Sid Black, Joseph Bloom UK AISI, Model Transparency Team Epistemic status: Most experiments were run over a period of ~2-3 days during a hackathon at UK AISI, and were fairly heavily vibe coded. Expect some of this to be...

"Can activation verbalizers surface an internal chain of thought?" by oakhu, ryan_greenblatt

June 22, 2026 1:58am 1:19

We introduce an evaluation for activation verbalizers: can they surface a target model's reasoning as it solves a math problem in a single forward pass? For open-weight NLAs, the answer seems to be: "possibly, but defini...

"The LLM shoggoth meme is weirder than you think" by HedonicEscalator

June 21, 2026 6:45pm 13 min

This article contains spoilers for At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and other works by H. P. Lovecraft. In 1931, Claude Mythos visited Lovecraft in a dream. From seething seas of stochastic f...

[Linkpost] "Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security" by gwern

June 21, 2026 3:58pm 3 min

This is a link post. Powerful LLMs will be deployed at global scale in the next few years, and will dominate the Internet, and increasingly, ordinary life. As of mid-2026, there is no coherent vision for how knowledge pr...

"Gears for political races" by Tom Smith

June 18, 2026 9:15pm 23 min

In the past few years, many people around me have tried to convince me that US electoral politics is important. But like many other people in the community, I’ve been suspicious of many of the high-level arguments that I...

"A frontier AI company should shut down" by MichaelDickens

June 16, 2026 11:45am 4 min

Cross-posted from my website. Prior discussion: niplav's shortform (2025); Planning for Extreme AI Risks (2025) by Joshua Clymer A frontier AI company (any one, I don't care which) should close shop and make an announc...

"Sympathy for both sides of the egregious misalignment debate" by Steven Byrnes

June 12, 2026 11:15pm 8 min

On one side of this debate is Yudkowsky & Soares, who think that (if AI progress continues) we’re on a direct path to egregiously-misaligned, scheming, out-of-control, rogue superintelligence (ASI), not even slightly nic...

"PSA: Almost nobody is working on alignment" by Chi Nguyen, peterbarnett

June 12, 2026 6:45am 1 min

People often assume that a large fraction of the AI safety community works on alignment. As far as we're aware, this is not true. Most people are not working on making sure superintelligent AIs are aligned with human val...

"Estimating No-CoT Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models" by Anders Cairns Woodruff, Francis Rhys Ward, Dewi Gould, Rauno Arike, Jason R Brown, Jo Jiao, wlanderson, ariana_azarbal, harrymayne, Patrick Leask

June 11, 2026 7:45am 10 min

(see full author list at the end) PAPER LINK About a year ago, METR showed that the length of tasks frontier models can reliably complete doubles every few months. A related safety-relevant question is this: what length ...

"Even “illegible” Mythos reasoning traces seem pretty legible" by faul_sname

June 11, 2026 3:15am 7 min

The Claude Fable 5/Mythos 5 System Card has a section in which they talk about illegible reasoning, and provide an "extreme" example thereof. Models developing their own uninterpretable, unmonitorable internal language h...

"Sequent: scale and automation for higher confidence in alignment" by Geoffrey Irving, Alex HT, Jesse Hoogland, Daniel Murfet, Jacob Pfau, Marco Cozzi, Stan van Wingerden

June 10, 2026 4:15pm 23 min

Alignment is not on track Artificial superintelligence (ASI) may be developed in the next few years. It is unclear whether alignment is on track to be ready on the same timeframe. At a minimum, the empirical programs at ...

"The Machines Lack Honour" by Raymond Douglas

June 10, 2026 1:15pm 19 min

The battle lines of the AI morality debate are being laid down. On one side you have the ChatGPT dogma: AI as mere tools with no real preferences or even beliefs. On the other you have the twitter AI whisperers: AIs as c...

"My favorite depiction of utopia" by Caleb Biddulph

June 04, 2026 4:45pm 57 min

For those who are trying to bring about a glorious transhuman utopia with the help of hopefully-aligned ASI, I think it's worth thinking explicitly about what utopia might actually look like and where it's likely to fall...

"Announcing the ARC White-Box Estimation Challenge" by Jacob_Hilton

June 03, 2026 11:45am 5 min

ARC has teamed up with AIcrowd to launch the ARC White-Box Estimation Challenge, a contest to improve upon our estimation algorithms for random MLPs. The warm-up round begins this week, and later rounds will have a total...

"Lighthaven East - A Feasibility Study" by JohnofCharleston

June 01, 2026 12:30pm 42 min

As a bureaucrat, my role is to annoy my friends. Someone voices an idea, “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” or “I wonder if we could…” I make a note. I do some estimates. If it pencils out, I’ll bring it back up, week after week....

"Empowerment, corrigibility, etc. are simple abstractions (of a messed-up ontology)" by Steven Byrnes

May 31, 2026 10:15pm 31 min

1.1 Tl;dr Alignment is often conceptualized as AIs helping humans achieve their goals: AIs that increase people's agency and empowerment; AIs that are helpful, corrigible, and/or obedient; AIs that avoid manipulating peo...

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