LessWrong posts by zvi

In The $140,000 Question, I went over recent viral claims about poverty in America.

The calculations behind the claims were invalid, the central claim (that the ‘true poverty line’ was $140k) was absurd, but the terrible vibes are real. People increasingly feel that financial life is getting harder and that success is out of reach.

‘Real income’ is rising, but costs are rising even more.

Before we get to my central explanations for that – the Revolution of Rising Expectations and the Revolution of Rising Requirements – there are calculations and histories to explore, which is what this second post is about.

How are costs changing in America, both in absolute terms and compared to real incomes, for key items: Consumer goods, education, health care and housing?

That's a huge percentage of where we spend our post-tax money.

And how is household wealth actually changing?

The economists are right that the basket of goods and services we typically purchase in these areas has greatly increased in both quantity and quality, in spite of various severe supply side problems mostly caused by regulations.

That is not what determines whether a person or [...]

---

Outline:

(01:28) The Debate Continues

(03:04) The Cost of Thriving Index Redux

(05:05) The Housing Theory Of Everything Remains Undefeated

(10:46) Did We Halt the Rise in Healthcare and Education Costs?

(15:10) Healthcare Costs

(19:53) Higher Education Costs

(23:11) Services Productivity is Rising But What Even Is Productivity Measuring

(24:58) On Clothing In Particular

(25:40) Our Price Free

(26:29) By Default Supply Side Is The Problem

(29:36) The Kids Are Financially Alright In Historical Terms

(33:25) Live Like a Khan

(36:15) We Should Be Doing Far Better On All This

---

First published:

Source:

---

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.

There was a no good, quite bad article by Michael Green that went viral. The condensed version was entitled ‘The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 Is the New Poverty,’ and a follow-up here.

His actual claim in that post, which was what caught fire, was that the poverty line should be $140,000, and even that this number is him ‘being conservative.’

Obviously that is not remotely true, given that:

Today's post covers this narrow question as background, including Green's response.

If you’ve already had your fill of that, including ‘well, yes, obviously, how are we bothering with all this, I know it went viral but someone was being Wrong On The Internet’ then you are not wrong. You can safely skip this post. It's fine.

I’m writing this as a lead-in to broader future discussions of the underlying questions:

---

Outline:

(01:51) None Of This Makes Any Sense

(03:40) Let's Debunk The Whole Calculation Up Front

(07:52) The Debunking Chorus

(12:12) Okay It's Not $140k But The Vibes Mean Something

(13:34) Needing Two Incomes Has A High Cost

(17:31) I Lied...

(21:41) ...But That's Not Important Right Now

(21:55) Poverty Trap

(24:48) Poverty Trap Versus Poverty Line

(28:04) Double or Nothing

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

Source:

---

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.

Here we go again, only a few weeks after GPT-5.1 and a few more weeks after 5.0.

There weren’t major safety concerns with GPT-5.2, so I’ll start with capabilities, and only cover safety briefly starting with ‘Model Card and Safety Training’ near the end.

Table of Contents

The Bottom Line

ChatGPT-5.2 is a frontier model for those who need a frontier model.

It is not the step change that is implied by its headline benchmarks. It is rather slow.

Reaction was remarkably muted. People have new model fatigue. So we know less about it than we would have known about prior models after this length of time.

If you’re coding, compare it to Claude Opus 4.5 and choose what works best for you.

If you’re doing intellectually [...]

---

Outline:

(00:29) The Bottom Line

(01:58) Introducing GPT-5.2

(03:49) Official Benchmarks

(05:54) GDPVal

(08:14) Unofficial Benchmarks

(11:11) Official Hype

(12:36) Public Reactions

(12:59) Positive Reactions

(19:09) Personality Clash

(24:30) Vibing the Code

(27:25) Negative Reactions

(30:37) But Thou Must (Follow The System Prompt)

(33:09) Slow

(34:16) Model Card And Safety Training

(36:23) Deception

(38:10) Preparedness Framework

(40:10) Rush Job

(41:29) Frontier Or Bust

---

First published:

Source:

---

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’m doing the Monthly Roundup early this month so that next week can be GPT-5.2 and affordability of life week, assuming we are not overtaken by other events.

Ban Gain of Function Research

The risk-reward profile of creating highly dangerous new viruses, supposedly in order to study them, is abysmal even when things are handled properly.

Also, the actual practice of it is completely utterly insane.

This below is the kind of thing that could very easily cause a global pandemic vastly worse than Covid, or even end civilization, and it was done in a BSL-2 laboratory, and no one has been arrested for it.

People need to be arrested for this. Ideally heads need to end up on pikes until it stops.

Maarten De Cock: A new gain of function study created chimeric coronaviruses that can infect human cells and kill mice (up to 100% mortality).

”The viral infection [and all animal experiments] were performed in a BSL-2 laboratory”(!)

*The authors thank a.o. Ben Hu & Zheng-Li Shi.

In The Zone

At current margins, zoning restrictions on home-based businesses are terrible and make everything worse. There of course [...]

---

Outline:

(00:22) Ban Gain of Function Research

(01:33) In The Zone

(02:07) A Price Is A Signal Wrapped In An Incentive

(03:18) While I Cannot Condone This

(04:56) The Gift Of Having A Gift To Give Away

(05:33) Good News, Everyone

(07:25) Paranoia, Paranoia

(14:18) A Good Book

(15:58) For Your Entertainment

(17:35) And The Warner Sister Dot

(19:30) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

(21:39) Think Of The Children

(25:16) Sports Go Sports

(27:30) Antisocial Media

(28:51) Government Working

(33:34) Variously Effective Altruism

(34:06) Party Time, Excellent

(37:33) Waste, Fraud, Abuse But Mostly No One Looked

(39:08) How You Do Anything

---

First published:

Source:

---

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.

It was touch and go, I’m worried GPT-5.2 is going to drop any minute now, but DeepSeek v3.2 was covered on Friday and after that we managed to get through the week without a major model release. Well, okay, also Gemini 3 DeepThink, but we all pretty much know what that offers us.

We did have a major chip release, in that the Trump administration unwisely chose to sell H200 chips directly to China. This would, if allowed at scale, allow China to make up a substantial portion of its compute deficit, and greatly empower its AI labs, models and applications at our expense, in addition to helping it catch up in the race to AGI and putting us all at greater risk there. We should do what we can to stop this from happening, and also to stop similar moves from happening again.

I spent the weekend visiting Berkeley for the Secular Solstice. I highly encourage everyone to watch that event on YouTube if you could not attend, and consider attending the New York Secular Solstice on the 20th. I will be there, and also at the associated mega-meetup, please do say hello.

If all [...]

---

Outline:

(01:38) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(03:17) ChatGPT Needs More Mundane Utility

(05:56) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(06:19) On Your Marks

(08:34) Choose Your Fighter

(10:14) Get My Agent On The Line

(12:10) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(12:52) Fun With Media Generation

(13:14) Copyright Confrontation

(13:25) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

(15:20) They Took Our Jobs

(21:34) Americans Really Do Not Like AI

(23:40) Get Involved

(25:06) Introducing

(26:11) Gemini 3 Deep Think

(27:16) In Other AI News

(29:35) This Means War

(31:11) Show Me the Money

(31:33) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

(33:55) Quiet Speculations

(35:21) Impossible

(37:58) Can An AI Model Be Too Much?

(39:39) Try Before You Tell People They Cannot Buy

(42:22) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(43:29) The Chinese Are Smart And Have A Lot Of Wind Power

(44:28) White House To Issue AI Executive Order

(50:42) H200 Sales Fallout Continued

(59:41) Democratic Senators React To Allowing H200 Sales

(01:01:17) Independent Senator Worries About AI

(01:02:53) The Week in Audio

(01:03:26) Timelines

(01:04:47) Scientific Progress Goes Boink

(01:08:36) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:12:22) Open Weight Models Are Unsafe And Nothing Can Fix This

(01:13:21) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:14:45) What AIs Will Want

(01:18:31) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:22:03) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:24:33) The Lighter Side

---

First published:

Source:

---

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.

The focus this time around is on the non-academic aspects of primary and secondary school, especially various questions around bullying and discipline, plus an extended rant about someone being wrong on the internet while attacking homeschooling, and the latest on phones.

Bullying

If your child is being bullied for real, and it's getting quite bad, is this an opportunity to learn to stand up for yourself, become tough and other stuff like that?

Mostly no. Actually fighting back effectively can get you in big trouble, and often models many behaviors you don’t actually want. Whereas the techniques you would use against a real bully outside of school, that you’d want to use, don’t work.

Schools are a special kind of bullying incubator. Once you become the target it is probably not going to get better and might get way worse, and life plausibly becomes a paranoid living hell. If the school won’t stop it, you have to pull the kid. Period.

If a child has the victim nature, you need to find a highly special next school or pull out of the school system entirely, or else changing schools will not help much for [...]

---

Outline:

(00:25) Bullying

(03:03) Discipline Death Spiral

(04:17) Ban Phones In Schools

(05:37) At Least Ban Phones During Class Seriously What The Hell

(07:26) RCT On Banning Phones

(15:44) Look What You Made Me Do

(17:16) DEI

(17:47) Equity Consultants

(18:56) Rules Are Rules

(19:17) School Shooting Statistics Are Fake And Active Shooter Drills Must Stop

(21:27) The War on Childhood

(22:56) Separation Of School And Home

(23:31) School Choice

(23:46) School is Hell

(24:21) Null Hypothesis Watch

(26:49) Education Labor Theory of Value

(28:30) Wrong on the Internet Including About Home School

(46:01) You Cannot Defer To Experts In A World Like This

(46:55) The Lighter Side

---

First published:

Source:

---

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.

AI is the most important thing about the future. It is vital to national security. It will be central to economic, military and strategic supremacy.

This is true regardless of what other dangers and opportunities AI might present.

The good news is that America has many key advantages in AI.

America's greatest advantage in AI is our vastly superior access to compute.

We are in danger of selling a large portion of that advantage for 30 pieces of silver.

This is on track to be done against the wishes of Congress as well as most of those in the executive branch.

Who does it benefit? It benefits China. It might not even benefit Nvidia.

Doing so would be both highly unwise and highly unpopular.

We should not sell highly capable Nvidia H200 chips to China.

If it is too late to not sell H200s, we must limit quantities, and ensure it stops there. We absolutely cannot be giving away other future chips on a similar delay.

The good news is that the stock market reaction implies this might not scale.

Bayeslord: I don’t know anyone who thinks this [...]

---

Outline:

(01:36) The Announcement

(04:38) How Bad Would This Be?

(11:42) Is There A Steelman Case For This Other Than 'Trade Always Good'?

(16:21) Compute Is A Key Limiting Factor For China and Chinese Labs

(17:53) What About That All Important 'Tech Stack'?

(20:37) Selling H200s Hurts America In The AI Race

(22:14) Nvidia Number Did Not Go Up That Much

---

First published:

Source:

---

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 believe that we will win.

An echo of an old ad for the 2014 US men's World Cup team. It did not win.

I was in Berkeley for the 2025 Secular Solstice. We gather to sing and to reflect.

The night's theme was the opposite: ‘I don’t think we’re going to make it.’

As in: Sufficiently advanced AI is coming. We don’t know exactly when, or what form it will take, but it is probably coming. When it does, we, humanity, probably won’t make it. It's a live question. Could easily go either way. We are not resigned to it. There's so much to be done that can tilt the odds. But we’re not the favorite.

Raymond Arnold, who ran the event, believes that. I believe that.

Yet in the middle of the event, the echo was there. Defiant.

I believe that we will win.

There is a recording of the event. I highly encourage you to set aside three hours at some point in December, to listen, and to participate and sing along. Be earnest.

If you don’t believe it, I encourage this all the more. If you [...]

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

DeepSeek v3.2 is DeepSeek's latest open model release with strong bencharks. Its paper contains some technical innovations that drive down cost.

It's a good model by the standards of open models, and very good if you care a lot about price and openness, and if you care less about speed or whether the model is Chinese. It is strongest in mathematics.

What it does not appear to be is frontier. It is definitely not having a moment. In practice all signs are that it underperforms its benchmarks.

When I asked for practical experiences and reactions, I got almost no responses.

A Brief History of DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a cracked Chinese AI lab that has produced some very good open models, done some excellent research, and given us strong innovations in terms of training techniques and especially training efficiency.

They also, back at the start of the year, scared the hell out of pretty much everyone.

A few months after OpenAI released o1, and shortly after DeepSeek released the impressive v3 that was misleadingly known as the ‘six million dollar model,’ DeepSeek came out with a slick app and with r1, a strong [...]

---

Outline:

(00:49) A Brief History of DeepSeek

(03:51) Once More, With Feeling

(06:23) Reading The Paper

(08:20) Open Language Model Offers Mundane Utility

(11:14) Those Benchmarks

(15:18) Open Language Model Doesn't Offer Mundane Utility

(16:49) Open Language Model Does Do The Math

(18:11) I'll Get You Next Time, Gadget

---

First published:

Source:

---

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.

The cycle of language model releases is, one at least hopes, now complete.

OpenAI gave us GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.1-Codex-Max.

xAI gave us Grok 4.1.

Google DeepMind gave us Gemini 3 Pro and Nana Banana Pro.

Anthropic gave us Claude Opus 4.5. It is the best model, sir. Use it whenever you can.

One way Opus 4.5 is unique is that it as what it refers to as a ‘soul document.’ Where OpenAI tries to get GPT-5.1 to adhere to its model spec that lays out specific behaviors, Anthropic instead explains to Claude Opus 4.5 how to be virtuous and the reasoning behind its rules, and lets a good model and good governance flow from there. The results are excellent, and we all look forward to learning more. See both the Opus 4.5 post and today's update for more details.

Finally, DeepSeek gave us v3.2. It has very good benchmarks and is remarkably cheap, but it is slow and I can’t find people excited to use it in practice. I’ll offer a relatively short report on it tomorrow, I am giving one last day for more reactions.

The latest attempt to slip unilateral [...]

---

Outline:

(01:47) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(02:51) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(04:14) On Your Marks

(05:21) Get My Agent On The Line

(06:02) Advertising Is Coming

(07:30) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(13:43) Fun With Media Generation

(15:11) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

(16:33) You Drive Me Crazy

(16:50) Unprompted Attention

(17:05) They Took Our Jobs

(22:49) Get Involved

(24:02) Introducing

(24:27) Variously Effective Altruism

(28:27) In Other AI News

(30:38) Show Me the Money

(30:45) Quiet Speculations

(32:06) Seb Krier On Agents Versus Multiagents

(38:24) Olivia Moore Makes 2026 Predictions

(41:17) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

(42:30) Americans Really Do Not Like AI

(47:46) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(49:57) My Offer Is Nothing

(55:28) America Pauses

(57:05) David Sacks Covered In New York Times

(01:00:12) The Week in Audio

(01:00:43) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:01:41) To The Moon

(01:08:54) Showing Up

(01:13:22) DeepMind Pivots Its Interpretability Research

(01:16:12) The Explicit Goal Of OpenAI Is Recursive Self-Improvement

(01:21:20) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:28:03) Misaligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence Is Difficult To Hire For

(01:29:12) You've Got Soul

(01:40:04) Disagreements About Timelines

(01:44:53) Other Disagreements About Timelines

(01:50:18) Messages From Janusworld

(01:50:33) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:50:58) The Lighter Side

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

Source:

---

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.