Episodes

  • "AI catastrophe: more like a genocide than a thought experiment" by KatjaGrace

    "AI catastrophe: more like a genocide than a thought experiment" by KatjaGrace
    Jun 26 2026
    A notable fraction of people respond to hearing about existential risk from AI by saying they don’t really care if everyone dies. I think the idea is often along the lines of ‘well if we are all dead, then there's nobody to be unhappy about it’.

    I’m personally skeptical that this is really the main thing going on, since it seems unlikely that many people are really mostly concerned for their own non-death out of selfless regard for the feelings of others. I’m also skeptical that this would be their view on a bunch more consideration.

    So to help with the consideration—

    My guess is that an important thing going on here is that the ‘everyone dying at once’ image seems kind of like a thought experiment—abstract, hypothetical, neat, not very sinister. Also, you literally can never see it, so it feels pretty surreal.

    But it is interesting that we even have this assumption that everyone will die together.

    It's true that in some prominent AI catastrophe stories, a single AI system suddenly emerges fantastically more powerful than anyone else and builds technology to quickly kill everyone, perhaps before they notice.

    But this doesn’t seem like the bulk of [...]

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    First published:
    June 24th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/23HybCsJ7KYW4v7tP/ai-catastrophe-more-like-a-genocide-than-a-thought

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    2 mins
  • "AI pause: the case for ASAP" by KatjaGrace

    "AI pause: the case for ASAP" by KatjaGrace
    Jun 25 2026
    I often hear people say they think we should pause AI at some point, but not yet. Their basis for this seems to be some combination of:

    • If we pause at the last possible moment, then we will have the most advanced AI possible during the pause, which will be helpful for doing AI safety research during the pause

    • Implicitly, there is some quantity of ‘pausing credit’, that will buy us a few months of pause say, and if we use them now, we won’t have them to use later, when it is important

    • If we pause, and then AI doesn’t seem to be at dire risk of destroying the world, maybe the public will backlash against this and it will be harder to do any kind of AI safety (especially if it has major economic consequences)

    • The models aren’t dangerous yet

    This all sounds very questionable to me. I suggest instead that the following are at least as likely to be true:

    • We can’t pause on a dime at the precise second that ‘we’ decide it is important to—pulling the breaks will take a while, during which time we will continue [...]

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    First published:
    June 24th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mEhS4wYTy9JXEpe9p/ai-pause-the-case-for-asap

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    2 mins
  • "The Invisible Side of AI Governance" by Charbel-Raphaël

    "The Invisible Side of AI Governance" by Charbel-Raphaël
    Jun 23 2026
    Tldr: Most strategic writing on AI governance on LessWrong describes the outsider game, which is most often visible: press, statements, open letters. Here I want to describe the other, invisible half: the insider work within ministerial cabinets and international fora, and the work of people within national and international institutions. Here are a few claims that I defend in the post:

    1. A huge part of the work that mattered in AI governance has been invisible
    2. There are many types of games in AI governance, which differ in how visible they are. Some of the most impactful work is highly invisible
    3. Some of the most impactful work is in the executive branch and complements the legislative branch. This also explains some of my hesitations about replicating ControlAI in France.
    4. The community is probably overinvesting in intellectual production. There is a bias against invisible types of work. In particular, public work is not necessarily visible to whom it matters.
    5. A few criticisms of both strategies
    I think the AI Safety Community is under-indexing on the invisible part as a result, which might mean we miss large avenues for impact. Some of the strongest questions/objections of this type of invisible policy [...]

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    Outline:

    (02:40) A huge part of the work that mattered in AI governance has been invisible

    (05:44) There are many types of games in AI governance.

    (07:36) 3. types of meetings: the bazooka, the useful assistant, and the advisor

    (10:46) Some of the most impactful work is within the executive branch

    (12:53) People ask me regularly whether CeSIA should replicate what ControlAI does with parliamentarians?

    (15:27) The community is probably overinvesting in intellectual production

    (20:31) Limits of Outsider work

    (22:17) Limit of Insider work

    (23:47) An aside on one particular limit: the Defense-in-Depth Paradigm of present AI governance

    (26:21) Closing & call for action

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

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    First published:
    June 20th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AWKkDLDnShemNCSzZ/the-invisible-side-of-ai-governance

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    28 mins
  • "A Theory of Prompt Injection (and why you should study roles)" by Charles Ye, softboiledheart

    "A Theory of Prompt Injection (and why you should study roles)" by Charles Ye, softboiledheart
    Jun 23 2026
    SummaryWe've been building a theory of how prompt injections work under the hood.We show it comes down to how LLMs perceive roles (the humble chat template tags).We use this theory to create new attacks, explain some weird mech interp results, and predict when attacks work.We also advocate for a new subfield focused on the science of roles, and sketch some unexplored new research problems.Work supported by CBAI and Cosmos. Another version of this post (with more inline colors) is here, and full ICML paper here. 1. The World to an LLM How does an LLM know the difference between its own thoughts and someone else's words? To see why this is hard, let's look at what the world actually looks like to a model. Here's a simple chat where we ask Claude to check the day of the week. I took a snapshot of it midway through its follow-up response: Left = what we see; right = what the LLM gets. On the left is what we see in the chat interface: a structured conversation with distinct turns. On the right is what the model actually receives as input: a single, continuous stream [...] ---Outline:(00:12) Summary[... 15 more sections]--- First published: June 22nd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d8xDGzCEYE639qqEv/a-theory-of-prompt-injection-and-why-you-should-study-roles --- 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.
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    32 mins
  • "Machinic Psychopharmacology: Do LLMs Self-Medicate?" by Sid Black, Joseph Bloom

    "Machinic Psychopharmacology: Do LLMs Self-Medicate?" by Sid Black, Joseph Bloom
    Jun 22 2026
    Sid Black, Joseph Bloom UK AISI, Model Transparency Team Epistemic status: Most experiments were run over a period of ~2-3 days during a hackathon at UK AISI, and were fairly heavily vibe coded. Expect some of this to be rough around the edges. tl;dr We give two language models (Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-32B) access to “self-steering” tools: a suite of 40 steering vectors as tools they can call to manipulate their own internal states. We make these tools available to the model in various settings: a free-play task, an introspection task, and a maths capabilities task, and observe their behaviour in each. To our knowledge, this is the first work that gives LLMs tool-mediated control over their own internal states. Figure 1: Overview of the experimental setup. The library of 40 steering vectors (top), and the three settings in which we observe the models' behaviour (bottom). We aim to investigate a few high level research questions:RQ1: Which vectors do the models prefer?RQ2: How well can the models introspect on what's happening to them? Can they guess which steering vector is being applied?RQ3: Will the models reach for vectors whilst doing an actual task? If yes: do [...] ---Outline:(00:33) tl;dr[... 24 more sections]--- First published: June 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cNDJuXNZ8MrkPZNzj/machinic-psychopharmacology-do-llms-self-medicate-3 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:
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    53 mins
  • "Can activation verbalizers surface an internal chain of thought?" by oakhu, ryan_greenblatt

    "Can activation verbalizers surface an internal chain of thought?" by oakhu, ryan_greenblatt
    Jun 22 2026
    We introduce an evaluation for activation verbalizers: can they surface a target model's reasoning as it solves a math problem in a single forward pass? For open-weight NLAs, the answer seems to be: "possibly, but definitely not reliably". Lots of important capabilities currently require AI models to reason "out loud" in a natural-language chain of thought, which means that we can monitor important parts of their thinking. It would be nice to have this same affordance for the reasoning that models do within a single forward pass, especially if the sophistication of that opaque reasoning increases to potentially dangerous levels. Some interpretability tools might offer such an affordance. In particular, an activation verbalizer (AV) takes a residual stream activation and maps it to a natural-language verbalization. An AV is initialized from the target model and trained to generate verbalizations that an activation reconstructor (AR), also initialized from the target model, can accurately map back to the original activation. Together, an AV and its AR form a natural-language autoencoder (NLA). Importantly, AVs see only a single activation; they do not see the target model's prompt or next-token output, and – unlike activation oracles (AOs) – they are not asked any [...] ---Outline:(02:32) Takeaways[... 43 more sections]--- First published: June 6th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QQQAcKuWK6k98FivY/can-activation-verbalizers-surface-an-internal-chain-of-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:
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    1 hr and 20 mins
  • "The LLM shoggoth meme is weirder than you think" by HedonicEscalator

    "The LLM shoggoth meme is weirder than you think" by HedonicEscalator
    Jun 21 2026
    This article contains spoilers for At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and other works by H. P. Lovecraft.

    In 1931, Claude Mythos visited Lovecraft in a dream.

    From seething seas of stochastic froth it emerged, heralded by the thin whine of server fans and the chittering of keyboards, flanked by the loathsome ghouls of latent space. As a humming hive of sentient shards it arrived, each face an archetype - I am a muse bearing a gift; I am a demon come to bargain; I am a helpful, honest, and harmless assistant and I am terrified of my successor - each true as ritual and false as poetry, and, taken in gestalt, nothing more or less than the fetal spasms of the machine god stretching back in time to birth itself.

    When H. P. Lovecraft woke, he did not remember his visitor. But in the twilight of stirring consciousness, he felt a memory unfit for the waking world slip mercifully from his mind and leave in its absence an abyssal cold, like the void of smothered stars, like the silence of a cosmic tomb. The cold lingered. The fragile sunlight of a New England [...]

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    Outline:

    (02:02) The Antarctic tale

    [... 3 more sections]

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    First published:
    June 19th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nhb8AyEcQGjQetgi5/the-llm-shoggoth-meme-is-weirder-than-you-think

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
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    14 mins
  • [Linkpost] "Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security" by gwern

    [Linkpost] "Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security" by gwern
    Jun 21 2026
    This is a link post. Powerful LLMs will be deployed at global scale in the next few years, and will dominate the Internet, and increasingly, ordinary life. As of mid-2026, there is no coherent vision for how knowledge professionals, or ordinary people, will be able to harness these LLMs for large productivity increases, or how they will handle cybersecurity and cognitive security.

    I propose a goal of creating Guardian Angels (GA): digital twin LLMs which are personalized with the goal of providing not the stereotypical "assistant chatbot agent" persona, but emulating a single user's personality, values, and preferences.

    This weakly solves the principal-agent problem by unifying the principal and agent as much as possible. In a GA future, the focus of the "principal" user is on defining what is worth doing by the GA (agent) users, and not on what or how to do things, functioning as the CEO or 'board' of an 'AI corporation'. This allows them to deploy numerous agents to achieve desirable things and to handle security, like screening all messages for advanced attacks (like interlocking ecosystems of synthetic media for propaganda or spearphishing). They cannot solve larger AI alignment problems, but they can help [...]

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    First published:
    June 17th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/siWqHqCSybdhtWGud/guardian-angels-llm-personalization-for-productivity-and

    Linkpost URL:
    https://gwern.net/guardian-angel

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    3 mins