This is a link post. Eliezer Yudkowsky did not exactly suggest that you should eat bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes. What he actually said was that an alien, looking from the outside at evolution, would predict that you would want to eat bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes. Still, I decided to buy a …

As far as I'm aware, Anthropic is the only AI company with official AGI timelines[1]: they expect AGI by early 2027. In their recommendations (from March 2025) to the OSTP for the AI action plan they say: As our CEO Dario Amodei writes in 'Machines of Loving Grace', we expect powerful AI systems will emerge in late 2026 or early 2027. Powerful AI s…

This is a link post. New Anthropic research (tweet, blog post, paper): We investigate whether large language models can introspect on their internal states. It is difficult to answer this question through conversation alone, as genuine introspection cannot be distinguished from confabulations. Here, we address this challenge by injecting representa…

This is a link post. You have things you want to do, but there's just never time. Maybe you want to find someone to have kids with, or maybe you want to spend more or higher-quality time with the family you already have. Maybe it's a work project. Maybe you have a musical instrument or some sports equipment gathering dust in a closet, or there's so…

Crosspost from my blog. Synopsis When we share words with each other, we don't only care about the words themselves. We care also—even primarily—about the mental elements of the human mind/agency that produced the words. What we want to engage with is those mental elements. As of 2025, LLM text does not have those elements behind it. Therefore LLM …

An Overture Famously, trans people tend not to have great introspective clarity into their own motivations for transition. Intuitively, they tend to be quite aware of what they do and don't like about inhabiting their chosen bodies and gender roles. But when it comes to explaining the origins and intensity of those preferences, they almost universa…

TL;DR: AI progress and the recognition of associated risks are painful to think about. This cognitive dissonance acts as fertile ground in the memetic landscape, a high-energy state that will be exploited by novel ideologies. We can anticipate cultural evolution will find viable successionist ideologies: memeplexes that resolve this tension by fram…

This is the latest in a series of essays on AI Scaling. You can find the others on my site. Summary: RL-training for LLMs scales surprisingly poorly. Most of its gains are from allowing LLMs to productively use longer chains of thought, allowing them to think longer about a problem. There is some improvement for a fixed length of answer, but not en…

I've created a highly specific and actionable privacy guide, sorted by importance and venturing several layers deep into the privacy iceberg. I start with the basics (password manager) but also cover the obscure (dodging the millions of Bluetooth tracking beacons which extend from stores to traffic lights; anti-stingray settings; flashing GrapheneO…

There is a very famous essay titled ‘Reality has a surprising amount of detail’. The thesis of the article is that reality is filled, just filled, with an incomprehensible amount of materially important information, far more than most people would naively expect. Some of this detail is inherent in the physical structure of the universe, and the res…

There's a strong argument that humans should stop trying to build more capable AI systems, or at least slow down progress. The risks are plausibly large but unclear, and we’d prefer not to die. But the roadmaps of the companies pursuing these systems envision increasingly agentic AI systems taking over the key tasks of researching and building supe…

(23K words; best considered as nonfiction with a fictional-dialogue frame, not a proper short story.) Prologue: Klurl and Trapaucius were members of the machine race. And no ordinary citizens they, but Constructors: licensed, bonded, and insured; proven, experienced, and reputed. Together Klurl and Trapaucius had collaborated on such famed artifice…

If you want to understand a country, you should pick a similar country that you are already familiar with, research the differences between the two and there you go, you are now an expert. But this approach doesn’t quite work for the European Union. You might start, for instance, by comparing it to the United States, assuming that EU member countri…

I recently visited my girlfriend's parents in India. Here is what that experience taught me: Yudkowsky has this facebook post where he makes some inferences about the economy after noticing two taxis stayed in the same place while he got his groceries. I had a few similar experiences while I was in India, though sadly I don't remember them in enoug…

This is a link post. Written in my personal capacity. Thanks to many people for conversations and comments. Written in less than 24 hours; sorry for any sloppiness. It's an uncanny, weird coincidence that the two biggest legislative champions for AI safety in the entire country announced their bids for Congress just two days apart. But here we are.…

In recent years, I’ve found that people who self-identify as members of the AI safety community have increasingly split into two camps: Camp A) "Race to superintelligence safely”: People in this group typically argue that "superintelligence is inevitable because of X”, and it's therefore better that their in-group (their company or country) build i…

There's an argument I sometimes hear against existential risks, or any other putative change that some are worried about, that goes something like this: 'We've seen time after time that some people will be afraid of any change. They'll say things like "TV will destroy people's ability to read", "coffee shops will destroy the social order","machines…

People don't explore enough. They rely on cached thoughts and actions to get through their day. Unfortunately, this doesn't lead to them making progress on their problems. The solution is simple. Just do one new thing a day to solve one of your problems. Intellectually, I've always known that annoying, persistent problems often require just 5 secon…

Summary: Looking over humanity's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, almostsix years later, reveals that we've forgotten to fulfill our intent atpreparing for the next pandemic. I rant. content warning: A single carefully placed slur. If we want to create a world free of pandemics and other biologicalcatastrophes, the time to act is now. —US White H…

Written by Eric Neyman, in my personal capacity. The views expressed here are my own. Thanks to Zach Stein-Perlman, Jesse Richardson, and many others for comments. Over the last several years, I’ve written a bunch of posts about politics and political donations. In this post, I’ll tell you about one of the best donation opportunities that I’ve ever…

Here's a story I've heard a couple of times. A youngish person is looking for some solutions to their depression, chronic pain, ennui or some other cognitive flaw. They're open to new experiences and see a meditator gushing about how amazing meditation is for joy, removing suffering, clearing one's mind, improving focus etc. They invite the young p…

"I heard Chen started distilling the day after he was born. He's only four years old, if you can believe it. He's written 18 novels. His first words were, "I'm so here for it!" Adrian said. He's my little brother. Mom was busy in her world model. She says her character is like a "villainess" or something - I kinda worry it's a sex thing. It's for s…

Current AI models are strange. They can speak—often coherently, sometimes even eloquently—which is wild. They can predict the structure of proteins, beat the best humans at many games, recall more facts in most domains than human experts; yet they also struggle to perform simple tasks, like using computer cursors, maintaining basic logical consiste…

About half a year ago, I decided to try stop insulting myself for two weeks. No more self-deprecating humour, calling myself a fool, or thinking I'm pathetic. Why? Because it felt vaguely corrosive. Let me tell you how it went. Spoiler: it went well. The first thing I noticed was how often I caught myself about to insult myself. It happened like mu…

About me and this review: I don’t identify as a member of the rationalist community, and I haven’t thought much about AI risk. I read AstralCodexTen and used to read Zvi Mowshowitz before he switched his blog to covering AI. Thus, I’ve long had a peripheral familiarity with LessWrong. I picked up IABIED in response to Scott Alexander's review, and …