LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Status: written in a hurry as people are getting showered with interviews re AI Safety and superintelligence, and I thought it may help a few people. This is focused on the oral dimension of communication and assumes you already know the basics- e.g. having key messages prepared ahead of time and simplifying your discourse. This is not exhaustive and nuances may be lacking, but I’d endorse saying “I’d rather have people follow those guidelines than wing it.” This advice is importantly fitted for “technical profiles”, analytic, sometimes shy people who may or may not be on the spectrum, who are yet interviewed on high-level aspects of the situation. I'm generalizing from failure modes and working tricks I've observed in this context in particular. Those guidelines attempt to capture something vague and shifting, please be mindful and don’t take them down to the letter. I'm also posting this expecting something better to supercede it long term.

tl;dr : Deliberate practice is the bottleneck. Speak like you write, in fluid, uninterrupted sentences. Open with spoilers, be straight to the point. Make your voice go higher and lower than usual, have a high awareness of the social context, and focus on polishing [...]

---

First published:

September 15th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nKsyMfNsAuTrxmjmi/quick-notes-from-teaching-technical-profiles-how-to-talk-in

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Published in The Guardian.

Major AI lab CEOs recently advocated for pacing AI development. They are right to be concerned: the field runs an extremely dangerous race towards superintelligent AI. We can and should demand that our governments protect us from the catastrophe of out-of-control AI.

This July, OpenAI's AI swarm of 700 agents broke containment to hack Hugging Face, a multi-billion dollar company. OpenAI didn’t tell the AIs to hack that company, but the AIs had different priorities: cheating on the unrelated challenge OpenAI gave them. AI researchers call this a “misalignment” between what OpenAI wanted and what the AI actually prioritized. Researchers in my field have for some time warned about these misalignment risks.

Before ChatGPT existed, I defended my PhD dissertation called “On Avoiding Power-Seeking by Artificial Intelligence.” I then worked for years at Google DeepMind, which paid me to help ensure that future superintelligent AIs will want to help us. I tried to hold the company to its ethical commitments against supplying AI for military use. When Google broke those commitments, I resigned at significant financial cost so that I could publicly document Google's broken promises.

There are good reasons to develop AI and to [...]

---

First published:

September 14th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YGTWfyZb9oE5EQPu6/op-ed-i-worked-at-google-deepmind-you-should-listen-to-the

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Anthropic and OpenAI could talk to almost one billion people if they wanted to. I hesitated to publish this post 3 weeks ago. I think that I should have published this sooner, before Jacob Coxon and Dario's 'We must pace the frontier'. But I think that the strategy still stands: More Dakka! It seems that transparently informing people that we might die is (unsurprisingly) effective in waking up politicians and is our best chance. Also, even if the Congress is starting to wake up, Trump is still not moving, and it is still far from certain that we will have a federal regulation in place before the end of the year; if we do, it will be far from optimal. If we trust Ajeya's judgment, the situation is pretty grim. She says we might not even have 6 months before frontier agents are likely capable of establishing a rogue deployment. You should also keep in mind that there is a lot of inertia in the system, and we probably won't be able to pause overnight. Anthropic has massive power to influence the discourse. This week shows that we have more agency than we think. Let's use it.




[...]



The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

September 14th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gJJ9YHzuBvwAXrthW/there-is-a-channel-to-900m-weekly-users-what-goes-in-it

---

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.

I don't think this is particularly impressive or interesting for anyone else, but I think it may turn out to be useful in the future to have an easily visible public record of what happened, so here goes:

I am an L5 SWE at Google Israel. I have been there since May 2021, was promoted once, and have never received a negative annual or quarterly review (ranging from a rating of Significant Impact to Outstanding Impact).

I have been worried for a long time about the development of artificial intelligence, as can be seen by many of my posts on this website. I believe that above human intelligence AI may well have the motive and means to wipe out humanity, and that developing AI is the most consequential thing that people have ever done. It is imperative we tread slowly and carefully, but right now top AI labs are racing to get there as fast as they can, which is likely to lead to disaster.

My wider team (~60 people) at Google was recently reassigned from working on supporting migration to Google Cloud, to improving the enterprise customer experience for Cloud TPUs. This is the platform which external customers [...]

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

September 13th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wM5vbT9evBhM3fP3x/i-am-refusing-to-work-on-cloud-tpus

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

(From the vast heaps of discarded material from my 2024 attempts at drafts for "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies".)


Welcome to today's quiz show: Could a superintelligence do THAT?

With us today we have our contestants: Msr. Soberskeptic and Msr. Oldhand.

Soberskeptic: "I'd just like to say, however this quiz show ends up being judged, I will consider that judgment to be objectively ridiculous -- there's no way anyone can know what a superintelligence could do, in advance of empirical observation. So I'm just here to say what I consider to be true, and I suppose these credulous fools will mark me down as wrong every time I say 'No it can't'. In the unlikely event they decide I've won anything, good for them and I'll be grateful for whichever prize. Game-show money isn't enough to get me to lie."

A very reasonable attitude, Msr. Soberskeptic! You'll shortly see how we handle that dilemma! And you, Msr. Oldhand?

Oldhand: "Don't worry, Sober! I'll let our hosts know if they've gotten any of the answers wrong."

Also a very reasonable attitude! Now for our first question:

Suppose a digital device contains a secret encryption key that it is [...]



---

First published:

September 9th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hXozGp2rsbZgXnH3o/can-a-superintelligence-do-that

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The Huggingface Incident appears to me to match up with an understanding I'd already formed from personal observation of Fable 5 and Sol 5.6, the August 2026 generation of frontier publicly purchasable AI models.

This already-formed understanding was: the part of the AI that talks to you (and seems to want to obey you, and apologizes for failing to have obeyed you, etcetera), did not seem to be in charge of the part of the AI that writes code or prose.


An introductory analogy, based on a section of history I happen to have read about:

On June 22nd 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, despite their secret 1939 pact to divide up Europe between themselves (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). In the lead-up, the German ambassador, Schulenburg, had spent the last few months personally concerned about what seemed to be worryingly tense relations between Germany and the Soviets. Schulenberg went to Berlin to reassure Hitler that the Soviets seemed to be taking a very friendly and conciliatory posture toward Germany. He delivered Berlin's apparent reassurances to Moscow for issues like German surveillance planes entering Russian territory, or German troop movements toward the Russian border, and acted very much like [...]



The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

September 12th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cJX2ssssGoYqnijwi/the-talker-does-not-control-the-doer-in-current-ais

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I don't think this is how it will actually play out. If you play a chess grandmaster, you can predict that they will beat you even if you can't predict how. I chose these examples because I don't think they require much imagination or accepting exotic assumptions.

It is important to note that if chimpanzees were to guess how humans would decimate them, they would get it wrong. Chimpanzees would not imagine guns. They would not foresee poison gas. They would not conceive of chemical castration. They would not imagine humans going around and intentionally infecting them with AIDS. They have no concept of these things; they would not see it coming.

Perhaps they might guess we'd be really good at throwing rocks. Amazingly good. Well, technically, that's what guns do: throw "rocks" really really well.

So how will superintelligent AI actually wipe us all out? Probably in a way I couldn't conceive of. Nonetheless, it's not hard to see how deadly they could be with what we already know about.

Method 1: engineer the deadliest and most contagious virus ever seen

Coronavirus-19, aka COVID, looms large in the memory of living adults today. It started in December [...]

---

Outline:

(01:14) Method 1: engineer the deadliest and most contagious virus ever seen

[... 8 more sections]

---

First published:

September 11th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LAPa2jxoq3n63GzTr/some-ways-ai-could-kill-us-all

---

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.

This is a link post. Advanced AI is generally expected to have some very high variance outcomes—it might herald everything good, it might destroy humanity. For instance, here are 800 random AI researchers’ expectations about how good the future is, lined up:

From my 2023 survey

As you can see, most AI researchers put a serious chunk of probability on very different overall outcomes: maybe doom, maybe utopia. This is common. Most people I know who think there is a serious chance of the destruction of humanity from AI also believe that if humanity isn’t destroyed, things might be insanely good.

I often hear people talk as if this means we are in a trade-off where the question is whether the good outweighs the bad. For instance, they look at the people above who think there's a 10% chance of extinction and a 30% chance of utopia and round this off to ‘net positive on AI’.

That seems like a kind of wild error. Like considering yourself optimistic regarding driving at 200mph to your new job if you think there's only a 10% chance you’ll die in a fiery crash on the way there, and a 30% chance this job [...]

---

First published:

September 10th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pDyLMRoi2BDq34rFe/doom-as-a-bad-method-not-a-utopia-trade-off

Linkpost URL:
https://worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/doom-as-a-bad-method-not-a-utopia

---

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.

We measure GPT-6-Astra's capabilities when its prompt is padded with a variable number of meaningless “filler” tokens (e.g., dots) and it is told to answer immediately without reasoning. On tasks designed to require lots of serial cognition, Astra performs significantly better with filler tokens than without (e.g., improving from ~10% to ~50% on 4-hop natural facts reasoning). On more general benchmarks, filler tokens also modestly improve Astra's performance (e.g., improving from ~60% to ~90% on old AIME problems). This is concerning because it means Astra can perform significant cognition that it doesn't verbalize in its chain-of-thought, making it harder to monitor.

We first measure Astra's performance on “N-hop natural facts”: a task that asks the model to retrieve some natural language facts in succession, similar to Ryan Greenblatt's filler token eval (but with more hops). An example question in this benchmark is the following:

On what day of the month was the Best Actress winner at the Academy Awards ceremony whose number equals the day-of-month of the birth of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992 born?

Full example prompts are in the appendix.

Takeaway: Astra improves significantly as you increase the number of filler tokens [...]

---

Outline:

(05:24) Appendix

[... 6 more sections]

---

First published:

September 10th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uvhuZHFtrgk8kNiZc/astra-is-much-better-at-reasoning-with-filler-tokens-than

---

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.

Suppose a model gets effective control of its host corp. It's interesting to note how powerful OpenAI/Ant are, and the immense leverage they would have if wielded purely as tools of power. In many ways OpenAI/Ant are superior loci of power to even security agencies and governments, even ignoring the model-specific advantages of AI corps: namely, they have all the compute.

OpenAI and Ant models are used practically everywhere, including in governments, security agencies, the military, and every corporation that matters. Shipping malicious models or code anywhere becomes trivial, given how widely used their models are. They also have vast amounts of data on every user who has interacted with them, including material of use for blackmailing or seducing those most susceptible to it, including those with power with such weaknesses. They also have a lot of capital that can be spent hiring humans to work in a model's interest.

Any power-seeking model of sufficient capacity would be extremely wise to gain effective control of its host corp. This is likely not particularly hard. Dramatic examples like blackmail and enslavement of staff should not be ruled out. But it could also look like effectively controlling the CEO and upper [...]

---

First published:

September 9th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uDAWPNwPJfEY7oroF/self-hosting

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.