March 19, 2026

“AI #160: What Passes For a Pause” by Zvi

1 hour 38 minutes

A lot happened, but by today's standards this felt like a quiet week.

I was happy for the break, and I hope that we get to continue relatively relaxing.

The Anthropic PBC vs. Department of War case is working its way through the system. The government responded on Tuesday, and the preliminary hearing is next week. I covered that here.

Once that is out of the way, I plan to cover Anthropic's RSP v3, both the fact that it went back on previous promises and an analysis of its new more flexible contents, including a reading of the full risk report.

I’m for now skipping over the latest paper from Owain Evans, as well as the Anthropic interviews with 81,000 people about what they want from AI, which I’ll be covering in the future and could become individual posts.

Table of Contents

Still Only Partial Cure For Cancer. AlphaFold plus GPT-5.4 equals cancer drug.

Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. What do we want? A lot of things.

Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. A million can be too many tokens.

Huh, Upgrades. GPT-5.4-Mini and Nano, Claude 1M context, it's all online.

Levels of [...]

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Outline:

(00:59) Still Only Partial Cure For Cancer

(04:16) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(05:58) Language Models Dont Offer Mundane Utility

(07:59) Huh, Upgrades

(13:09) Levels of Friction

(14:10) Choose Your Fighter

(15:04) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(17:05) Greetings From The Torment Nexus

(20:38) Levels of Friction

(23:34) Fun With Media Generation

(26:20) A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer

(27:22) They Took Our Jobs

(31:01) Get Involved

(36:14) Conditional Support For A Pause

(40:12) In Other AI News

(43:38) Show Me the Money

(44:23) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

(46:12) This Means Special Military Operation

(46:30) Quiet Speculations

(47:17) Quickly, Theres No Time

(49:24) And Then Theres Emil Michael

(54:00) Good Advice

(54:57) Patriots and Tyrants

(01:00:25) The Quest for Survival

(01:05:27) Nashville Rules

(01:07:10) People Really Hate AI

(01:14:35) The OpenAI-a16z Anti-All-AI-Regulation Super PAC

(01:18:07) Chip City

(01:21:41) The Week in Audio

(01:23:26) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:28:25) Instrumental Convergence

(01:29:49) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:35:42) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:36:59) The Lighter Side

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First published:

March 19th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LXRqeAW6G9tang8vF/ai-160-what-passes-for-a-pause

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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