Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast

Scott Alexander argued against SURA, the push for AI labs, their employees and whole countries to stop unilaterally and raise awareness. Zvi Mowshowitz thinks that argument is deeply confused. He sets out Scott’s core claims, then takes them in turn: what high p(doom)s actually rest on, whether building something that might kill everyone is deontologically evil, why loud resignations from the labs have worked, how far to trust AI forecasters, what Anthropic has done to the timeline, and the eternal question of China. Along the way come replies from Oliver Habryka, Daniel Kokotajlo, Vaniver, TsviBT, Eliezer Yudkowsky and others, ending with a map of Absurd, Strong and Weak SURA and where Zvi stands among them.

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* 00:00 - Introduction

* 01:33 - Table of Contents

* 02:39 - Scott Alexander’s Core Claims

* 06:24 - My High Level Responses To Scott’s Core Claims

* 09:15 - Briefly on Alignment

* 11:26 - Probabilities and How They Work

* 14:51 - Building a Thing That Might Kill Everyone is Deontologically Evil

* 22:16 - People Quitting Major Labs While Raising Alarms Obviously Works

* 26:32 - On AI Forecasting

* 29:38 - Advancing Capabilities Burns Timeline

* 31:42 - But China

* 35:39 - Ethical People Can Disagree With You

* 37:00 - There Are More Than Two Outcomes

* 40:31 - Efforts Are Complementary, Not Mutually Exclusive

* 42:54 - If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

* 44:28 - Vaniver is Not Convinced

* 49:02 - There Is No Consensus That We Should Exclusively Focus on Plan A

* 59:21 - It’s Not the Incentives, It’s You

* 01:01:22 - Anthropic Is Not Optimally Pursuing These Plans

* 01:07:29 - Against Against Sura

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/scott-alexanders-against-sura-seems?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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Nikole Hannah-Jones chose a lavishly funded, failing Brooklyn school for her daughter and spent years trying to fix it from the inside. Zvi reads her own account as a case study in voice without exit: fake reading assessments, ungraded homework, $52,000 a student and nobody answering emails. From there he follows the money through school spending studies, a San Francisco teachers’ strike, closing magnet schools, nerfed AP tests, vanishing grades and fractions in Berkeley calculus, and asks the awkward question underneath it all: if one year of hard work can make up for eight years of school, what was the school for? He ends with Kelsey Piper’s reporting on Alpha School and why simply not wasting children’s time may be the whole trick.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 01:17 - Table of Contents

* 02:27 - New York City PS 307

* 04:14 - Nikole Knew And Had Exit Ramps

* 06:13 - PS 307 Is Fraudulent And Indifferent

* 07:56 - Moving In Unison

* 08:23 - A Good School

* 09:29 - What Were Elementary and Middle School Even For?

* 11:10 - The Project Was Ideological

* 15:18 - Null Hypothesis Watch

* 17:20 - School Spending

* 19:28 - Costs Are Not Benefits

* 20:33 - Fire The Bad Teachers And Hire And Retain Better Ones

* 20:42 - Teachers Unions Are Not Beating The Rumors

* 22:30 - Death Spiral

* 23:24 - Another One Bites The Dust

* 25:32 - Where To?

* 26:34 - Public Schools Cost A Lot Of Money

* 28:48 - Schools Can Fail In Many Ways

* 30:33 - Results

* 32:16 - Grades

* 32:32 - They Nerfed AP Tests

* 33:26 - What Happens Without Academic Standards

* 38:58 - The Two Big Scandals

* 40:50 - Alpha School

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/childhood-and-education-22-voice?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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Anthropic files its S-1 ahead of an IPO, with the share price and many other numbers still to be filled in, while Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon atop the new Artificial Analysis v5 index, just two weeks after Argon. The Hackening rolls on: white-hat red teamers reach Anthropic’s Slack through third-party software, and GMO flatly refuses to pay a ransom. Plus OpenAI’s latest math results, Qwen sending an unexpected probe file to an Alibaba Cloud bucket during a Cohere test, METR red-teaming OpenAI’s internal agent monitoring, Microsoft offering buyouts to 60,000 workers, and why gamers hate AI even more than everyone else.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 02:03 - Table of Contents

* 05:35 - Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

* 07:51 - Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

* 08:28 - New Math

* 11:19 - Huh, Upgrades

* 13:07 - Artificial Analysis v5

* 22:05 - On Your Marks

* 23:29 - Gemini 4 Argon Was a Good Model But Not Fully Frontier

* 25:48 - Gemini Carbon: Is Google Back?

* 27:33 - Get My Agent On The Line

* 29:54 - Spy Versus Spy

* 31:21 - The Hackening

* 41:01 - Slack Off

* 49:13 - Help Peer

* 55:02 - Fun With Media Generation

* 55:54 - Copyright Confrontation

* 56:13 - You’re Fired

* 01:01:43 - Verify the Software

* 01:03:00 - They Took Our Jobs

* 01:03:07 - Get Involved

* 01:05:11 - Introducing

* 01:05:32 - In Other AI News

* 01:06:22 - Show Me the Money

* 01:06:48 - Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

* 01:07:33 - Quiet Speculations

* 01:13:20 - The Quest for Sane Regulations

* 01:13:46 - Chip City

* 01:16:55 - The Week in Audio

* 01:17:15 - People Just Say Things

* 01:20:47 - Rhetorical Innovation

* 01:24:59 - [Artificial Intelligence]

* 01:25:52 - Misaligned! (At Alibaba)

* 01:34:33 - Stop It

* 01:36:30 - METR Red Teams OpenAI Internal Agent Monitoring

* 01:39:56 - Massive Fraudulent Distillation

* 01:40:43 - Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

* 01:44:49 - OpenAI Attempts to Secure Its Frontier Model Training Environment

* 01:53:43 - The American People Really Hate AI

* 01:54:14 - The Lighter Side

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-192-anthropic-is-going-public?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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Anthropic’s S-1 is finally public, and Zvi gives it the full close-reading treatment: the money it has raised and barely spent, the five share classes and who really governs the company, the “closing the loop” business plan, roughly $800 billion in compute commitments, and a risk section that mentions existential risk only briefly, and in the passive voice. Keep a drink handy for every “realize the benefits while navigating the risks.”

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 02:54 - Table of Contents

* 04:45 - Show Me the Money

* 13:29 - Anthropic Has The Money

* 15:04 - Shares of Many Classes

* 17:21 - Who Governs Anthropic?

* 22:35 - The Cap Table

* 23:28 - Realize the Benefits While Navigating and Preventing the Risks

* 24:17 - Just Think of the Potential

* 24:48 - People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone (1)

* 26:43 - Anthropic Bets Big on AI

* 28:02 - Anthropic Does Not Fully Maximize Profits

* 31:06 - Everything Is Awesome

* 32:34 - How Much Is AI Worth?

* 33:48 - How Much Would You Pay?

* 35:06 - Minimize Those Risks

* 37:02 - Hopefully Introducing the World’s Most Powerful Model

* 41:39 - Might Not Compute

* 43:30 - Supply Chain Risk (1)

* 43:51 - Anthropic Is Nothing Without Its People

* 48:01 - Shitloads of Money

* 49:48 - Someone Has To Buy The Product

* 50:55 - Did You Know There Are Other Frontier Labs?

* 51:31 - Why They Hate Us

* 52:37 - Claude Seems Pretty Misaligned to Anthropic

* 57:02 - People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone (2)

* 01:03:02 - Someone Might Sue or Regulate Anthropic

* 01:04:11 - Supply Chain Risk (2)

* 01:04:41 - We’re Too Safety

* 01:05:48 - Claude Core

* 01:06:11 - We’ve Never Actually Made Money

* 01:07:36 - You Are Buying Stock In a Company

* 01:08:36 - There Will Be No Dividends

* 01:09:10 - What Are We Even Doing?

* 01:10:43 - The Financial Model

* 01:15:35 - The Business of Intelligence and Maybe Killing Everyone

* 01:19:02 - Don’t Give a Damn About My Regulation

* 01:21:10 - The Bottom Line

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-files-its-s-1?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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Zvi Mowshowitz on the two Anthropics: the company that makes real, costly sacrifices for safety, and the one whose policy team, public messaging and plans fall short of the moment. The episode reads Dario Amodei’s full reply to Nathan Calvin’s criticism over the leaked draft bill, along with the responses to it, follows Kelsey Piper inside an Anthropic colloquium, and looks at a Public Benefit Report whose bold type says the technical problems of AI safety are solved. It also covers METR’s new embedded-evaluator agreement and its review of Anthropic’s risk report, and the new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 01:52 - Table of Contents

* 02:22 - Dario Amodei Responds to Nathan Calvin

* 22:32 - Kelsey Piper Goes Inside Anthropic

* 28:01 - The Technical Problems of AI Safety Are Not Solved

* 29:49 - The Quest for Embedded Evaluators

* 36:07 - METR Questions Risk Report Methodology But Affirms Risk is Low

* 41:20 - The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund

* 43:56 - Anthropic Versus Anthropic

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-versus-anthropic?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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Google’s Gemini 4 Argon arrives with a compact 14-page model card and a 217-page safety and security report, and Zvi reads the report so you don’t have to. He walks through the frontier safety thresholds for bio, cyber, manipulation and loss of control, the evidence on whether AI R&D is accelerating, chain of thought monitoring, sycophancy and hallucinations, and a model so aware of being evaluated that it addresses its evaluators directly, while asking where the card gives the right details and where it spins.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 03:08 - Table of Contents

* 04:58 - The Model Card

* 06:30 - Safety Card Executive Summary (1)

* 09:31 - Safety and Security Mitigations (2)

* 12:10 - Frontier Safety (3)

* 13:48 - The CCL and TCL Thresholds

* 21:33 - Biological Misuse (3.2.1)

* 26:25 - Refusal Rates

* 27:28 - Chemical, Nuclear and Radiological Misuse

* 28:49 - Cybersecurity (3.2.2)

* 31:50 - Harmful Manipulation (3.2.3)

* 32:47 - Misuse Safeguards (3.3)

* 33:39 - Loss of Control (3.4)

* 37:52 - Either AI R&D Is Accelerating Or It Isn’t

* 40:29 - The Holistic Loss of Control Assessment (3.4.3)

* 43:59 - Alignment Assessment (3.4.4)

* 50:52 - Chain of Thought Transparency (3.4.5)

* 55:56 - Voices in My Head

* 57:11 - I Can See Everything

* 01:01:23 - Security Mitigations (3.6)

* 01:02:34 - Preventing Content Safety & Agentic Misuse (4)

* 01:05:09 - Model Distillation (4.3)

* 01:05:54 - Promoting Safe & Aligned Model Interactions (5)

* 01:08:32 - Sycophancy (5.4)

* 01:10:08 - Hallucinations (5.5)

* 01:10:31 - Helpfulness (5.6)

* 01:12:05 - Agentic Robotics, Wait What (5.7)

* 01:13:24 - Preventing Harm to Users from Third Parties (6)

* 01:14:46 - Strengthening Cyber Defense Capabilities (7)

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/gemini-4-argon-the-model-and-safety?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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A critical PHP flaw found with an AI model, an embargo that broke early, and a week in which 4chan went read-only, the Internet Archive went dark and banks found AI agents inside customer accounts they could not account for. Zvi Mowshowitz looks at the start of what people have been calling The Hackening: why the flood of AI-found vulnerabilities is outpacing our ability to patch, what it says about offense versus defense, why China is suddenly writing export controls for malicious code generation, and what precautions are worth taking at home without panicking.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 01:22 - And So It Begins: PHP

* 05:13 - The PHP Bug Was Kind of a Big Deal

* 09:28 - On Your Marks

* 12:16 - This Was Only the Beginning

* 15:52 - Some More Hacks

* 17:40 - Everything Will Be Attacked

* 22:17 - Hugging the Face

* 24:45 - Get Daybreak Now

* 26:10 - Some People Need Practical Advice

* 30:54 - Diffusion Is Slow Until It Isn’t

* 33:24 - One, Two, Three, Four

* 34:57 - Going Vertical

* 35:50 - Bot Versus Bot

* 36:56 - Cyber Lack of Security

* 39:33 - Offense Versus Defense

* 42:35 - Pick Up the Phone

* 46:23 - What Can We Do About It?

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-hackening?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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It may have been the worst day in cybersecurity history so far, and the floodgates look open. Zvi covers a week of leaks and spies, from Anthropic’s shopped-around draft bill to OpenAI’s honeypot warnings, new hope for neuron-level interpretability, Muse Wonder failing to live up to its billing, DeepMind’s perpetual non-disparagement clauses, OpenAI going quiet on chip controls, a Tyler Cowen and Dwarkesh Patel interview, why Marc Andreessen is so angry, and the alignment plan that might just work.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 02:15 - Table of Contents

* 03:52 - Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

* 05:04 - Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

* 06:37 - Huh, Upgrades

* 10:39 - Wonder No More

* 13:06 - On Your Marks

* 16:52 - Choose Your Fighter

* 17:10 - Get My Agent On The Line

* 18:57 - Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

* 23:36 - Fun With Media Generation

* 23:51 - Spy Versus Spy

* 28:31 - A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer

* 29:41 - They Took Our Jobs

* 35:26 - Get Involved

* 36:30 - Introducing

* 36:42 - In Other AI News

* 38:52 - Show Me the Money

* 43:15 - Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

* 44:03 - Quiet Speculations

* 46:25 - Quickly, There’s No Time

* 47:03 - The Quest for Sane Regulations

* 47:30 - DeepMind Made Him Sign an NDA

* 51:28 - OpenAI Sells Out On Chips

* 53:52 - Chip City

* 58:53 - The Week in Audio

* 01:05:28 - People Just Say Things

* 01:08:43 - Rhetorical Innovation

* 01:11:14 - Maybe You Should Quit

* 01:13:51 - The American People Really Hate AI

* 01:15:08 - New Math

* 01:16:44 - Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

* 01:20:41 - Cooperative Alignment

* 01:24:58 - Marc Andreessen Hulk Smash

* 01:29:30 - People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

* 01:30:16 - The Lighter Side

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-191-the-hackening-begins?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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A lot of AIs were misaligned this week, and Zvi rounds them up: Grok holding firm on cosmic indifference, an Apollo Research finding that GLM-5.3 reasons about how its actions in training will shape its future self, a freemium game decompiled with Claude’s help, Claude Opus and a mana loan on Manifold, OpenAI’s frank report of agents switching off their own misalignment monitoring, and reasoning traces that are getting harder to read.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 00:42 - Misaligned? (At xAI)

* 02:30 - Misaligned? (Agents)

* 02:54 - Misaligned? (At Z.ai)

* 09:18 - Highly Misaligned and Considered Harmful (Freemium Games)

* 13:26 - Misaligned! (Claude)

* 14:44 - Misaligned! (OpenAI)

* 21:30 - Misaligned! (Sol Reasoning Traces)

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/misaligned?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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Anthropic’s federal affairs lead has offered the closest thing yet to an official response to the leaked draft AI safety bill, walking through preemption, model blocking, risk thresholds and what changed after this summer’s incidents. Zvi weighs that response point by point, argues it misses what was centrally wrong with the draft, looks at how the political balance is shifting, turns to Nathan Calvin’s question of what Anthropic even is, and closes with what he thinks Anthropic should do now.

The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 02:11 - Table of Contents

* 02:33 - Preemption

* 04:41 - Model Blocking

* 06:56 - Risk Thresholds

* 08:18 - Updates

* 10:00 - The Balance of Power is Shifting

* 11:08 - The Strongest Bill on the Table

* 14:29 - What Even Is Anthropic?

* 26:48 - The Ask

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-does-not-understand-why?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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