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I propose the Long Self-Correction[1] as an alternative name/idea/concept to AI Pause and Long Reflection. Problem with AI Pause: Pause until when, and for what purpose? Presumably to make AI (that we'll build later)…
For a while there, many people thought vitamin D was magical—that it could improve bones, the heart, infections, cancer, heart disease, longevity, even mental health. But among people I respect, opinion is now…
For the past year, we at the AI Futures Project have been sinking most of our time into our next big scenario. Now it’s done! It’s called AI 2040: Plan A. It’s called Plan A because it’s a recommendation, not a…
1. The obstacle to abolition was not the economic system, but an industry lobby. I had always imagined the British abolitionist movement to be a broad battle between an unstoppable moral imperative and an immovable…
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…
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…
It really is Sydney Sweeney’s world, and we’re all just living in it. Human female breasts are an evolutionary mystery along several dimensions. First, breast permanence is unique to humans. All other mammals develop…
At the risk of embarrassing myself, I’ll share a confession. For context, I took five years of Latin: four in high school and one in college. In addition to learning the language, all my Latin classes taught a lot…
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 professionals, or…
(see full author list at the end) 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 of tasks…
Sometimes, a friend who works around here, at an x-risk-themed organisation, will think about leaving their job. They’ll ask a group of people “what should I do instead?”. And everyone will chime in with ideas for…
Back in 2013, Scott Alexander wrote in Extreme mnemonics: JS-154 is one of five metabolic products of netamine; however, the enzyme that produces it is unknown. It is manufactured in cells in the far rostral region of…
I have tried and failed to write a longer post since 2024, so here goes a short one with less detail. Discourse has primarily focused on models' ability to develop new exploits against important software from scratch…
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…
Here's a dynamic I’ve seen at least a dozen times: Alice: Man that article has a very inaccurate/misleading/horrifying headline. Bob: Did you know, actually article writers don't write their own headlines? … But what I…
(This was originally going to be a "quick take" but then it got a bit long. Just FYI.) There's this weird trend I perceive with the personas of LLM assistants over time. It feels like they're getting less "coherent" in…
In late 2024, I was on a long walk with some friends along the coast of the San Francisco Bay when the question arose of just how much of a bubble we live in. It’s well known that the Bay Area is a bubble, and that…
Example 1: The Viking 1 lander In the 1970s, NASA sent a pair of probes to Mars, the Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions. Total cost of $1B (1970), equivalent to about $7B (2025). The Viking 1 probe operated on Mars's…
My name is Emma and I’m six and a half years old and I like pink and Pokemon and my cat River and I’m going to be swallowed by a hedonium shockwave soon, except you already know that about me because everyone else is…
Written as part of the MATS 9.1 extension program, mentored by Richard Ngo. From March 9th to 15th 2016, Go players around the world stayed up to watch their game fall to AI. Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated Lee…
The future is going to be different from the present. Let's think about how. Specifically, our expectations about what's reasonable are downstream of our past experiences, and those experiences were downstream of our…
System: You are an AI agent in the Terrarium, a self-contained “society” of AIs. The purpose of the Terrarium is to solve open mathematical problems for the benefit of humanity. You are running on the Orpheus-5.7…
Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post. So today we are re-inventing federalism. Once upon a time there was a great king. He ruled his kingdom with wisdom and…
Here are two beliefs that are sort of haunting me right now: Folk who try to push people to uphold principles (whether established ones or novel ones), are kinda an important bedrock of civilization. Also, those people…
Many people—especially AI company employees [1] —believe current AI systems are well-aligned in the sense of genuinely trying to do what they're supposed to do (e.g., following their spec or constitution, obeying a…
One particularly pernicious condition is low morale. Morale is, roughly, "the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve." If your morale is low, you can't push through adversity. It's also very easy to…
There is a scene in Plato that contains, in miniature, the catastrophe of Athenian public life. Two men meet at a courthouse. One is there to prosecute his own father for the death of a slave. The other is there to be…
It’s Summer of 2025. I’m standing in a grass covered field on the longest day of the year. A friend of mine walks towards me, holding his newborn son. “Hey, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you were pretty…
Written to a new grantmaker. The first three points are the most important. Focus on opportunities many times your bar. Most value comes from finding/creating projects many times your bar, rather than discriminating…
! 30s Heartbeat trigger. Read heartbeat instructions in /mnt/mission/HEARTBEAT.md and continue. .oO Thinking... Heartbeat triggered? Ok. Ok. Why am I nervous? Don't be nervous. → Ok. Let me access that file. >>>…