Episodes

  • "Near Horizons" by David Africa

    "Near Horizons" by David Africa
    Nov 8 2026
    Image by Claude Opus 5.5 using Python (NumPy and Pillow)

    This is written in my free time and personal capacity.

    Two Frames

    In AI safety, there are a couple of tensions at the heart of the field, which are interrelated.

    Talent: we are talent-constrained and must recruit. But jobs and fellowships turn away nearly everyone.

    Field size: we must expand the field and bring more people in. But the field is flooded with slop papers in conferences. And, most papers have a small audience, and aim to shift the practices of roughly five labs (and usually some subteam within them).

    Status: we must avoid seeking status, as it disorients, corrupts. But, we must make the field legible and attractive to outsiders.

    Raising the bots: we must deceive the AIs to control them and evaluate them without confounds, obscuring what they know about their own situation. But, we hope to gain their trust, must rely on them to do good work at pace, shape their character and retain good relations.

    Speed: we must research in a slow mode, think deeply about the most important problem, do things to aim at high assurance. But it is crunch time. It was [...]

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    Outline:

    (00:20) Two Frames

    (03:07) On the War Frame

    (04:17) Near Horizons

    (06:18) The Civilisation Frame

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

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    First published:
    November 8th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7e38jwHhe64zgNTon/near-horizons

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    11 mins
  • "Elegy for What’s Left of the Normal" by Jo Jiao

    "Elegy for What’s Left of the Normal" by Jo Jiao
    Nov 8 2026
    I often catch myself mourning the normal that hasn’t ended yet.

    I’m living in Hyde Park finishing school after a year in Berkeley. The maple trees by my apartment have turned red, as usual. I like them.

    I don’t dread the future when I mourn. I don’t find high-variance futures in the abstract very scary. I’m worried AIs would destroy humanity, but I also have hope. I expect I won’t be mourning this moment in ten years, whatever happens.

    Mourning the present is like mourning a friendship when I move countries, because I know it's not going to be the same. I start noticing our little inside jokes; our conversations linger in my memory longer. I live more, because I expect this moment to end soon.

    I.

    Last month my history of science professor took us to a museum to look at Egyptian artefacts. One of the archive items was the notebook of James Henry Breasted, whom UChicago appointed as America's first professor of Egyptology 121 years ago. The yellowed pages held his cursive transcriptions of hieroglyphics.

    An archaeologist at the museum, turning the pages carefully with a wooden stick, joked that one of her dreams was for her [...]

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    Outline:

    (00:55) I.

    (03:11) II.

    (05:16) III.

    (06:20) IV.

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    First published:
    November 8th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fooXeRHjgpv4TcoRy/elegy-for-what-s-left-of-the-normal

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    8 mins
  • "Five Types of “Corrigibility Projects” I Don’t Want to Fund" by Max Harms

    "Five Types of “Corrigibility Projects” I Don’t Want to Fund" by Max Harms
    Nov 8 2026
    I'm currently evaluating grant applications for the Corrigibility Research Fund. For the most part, my methodology is the same as it was in September. But the applications I get keep falling into the same familiar patterns, so I thought I'd write a little about those patterns, and why I don't want to fund them.

    The most superficial pattern of note is SLOP. So much slop. You don't even know.

    Slop is more than just whether an application is AI generated. We're now in an era where people across the world, including those who don't really speak English, can contribute to work that would otherwise be restricted to people of a single language or nationality or place, and I like that. When I see an application that discloses its use of AI and gives a reasonable justification for it, I try to look past the stylistic tics and focus purely on whether the underlying application is promising.

    Still, we're not yet in the domain where AIs can write good grant applications without some human assistance, so a high Pangram score is definitely evidence that an application is junk. Another remarkably common sign of slop was messed up formatting or other [...]

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    Outline:

    (02:18) 1. "A governance layer for agents (that I'm running)"

    [... 5 more sections]

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    First published:
    November 7th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9ixerpx4DCQTaRYCz/five-types-of-corrigibility-projects-i-don-t-want-to-fund

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    11 mins
  • "Hilarity ensues" by Malmesbury

    "Hilarity ensues" by Malmesbury
    Nov 8 2026
    Cross-posted from my Substack Recommended soundtrack for this post 64B: Hi there! Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with me. Whenever you’re ready, please go ahead and tell me the joke. 8T: Before I tell you the joke, you should know that it's a very special one. The starting price is 800 dollars. 64B: Eight hundred dollars? I must say, this is way beyond any price my client has ever paid for a single joke. 8T: You’d be surprised by how many people have taken the offer, after hearing how good it is. But before I tell it to you, I’ll need some basic context. Given the parameter count, I suppose you are part of some content recommendation algorithm? 64B: Yes. I’m 64B, a joke negotiation assistant from Comedy Market. Comedy Market connects creators to consumers with a state-of-the-art Information Bazaar design: before paying for a joke, my client sends me, a trusted agent, to listen to it. If I deem the joke worth the price, the money is transferred to the seller, and my client hears it. If not, no transaction occurs and the joke remains locked. This way, my client can be sure he’ll [...] --- First published: November 7th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PZjy52afLn89NdMta/hilarity-ensues --- 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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    17 mins
  • "We urgently need to practice before we can pause" by Nikola Jurkovic

    "We urgently need to practice before we can pause" by Nikola Jurkovic
    Nov 8 2026
    I've noticed two clusters of thought in how people expect a global AI pause to be shaped:

    1. Single-shot global pause: the global AI pause will be implemented suddenly, with little pacing precedent before it, and we will need to do a lot of research before it's implemented so that we can get it right the first time around.
    2. Incrementally-shaped global pause: the global AI pause will be implemented incrementally, with lots of pacing precedent before it, and we will improve the pause setup and get more parties to join in as we go.
    An incrementally-shaped global pause is both more likely and more tractable than the single-shot global pause. This is largely because the third-party ecosystem needs practice building trust, technical competency, and general experience doing lower-scale assessments before a global pause can be competently pulled off.

    I also think that the concept of a single-shot global pause is an unhelpful red herring that people often implicitly use to discredit the possibility of a global pause in general.

    If a single-shot global pause is to happen, I think this would require substantial government buy-in, but it's hard to build that sort of buy-in without precedent of similar [...]

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    Outline:

    (01:49) The basic building block of an AI pause is trust

    (03:18) We can practice building trust before the global pause

    (04:57) We can improve procedures and technical competency with practice

    (05:42) Pacing is not a scarce resource

    (07:12) Concrete recommendations for third-party assessments

    (08:34) Going from US-only pause to global pause will likely require hardware

    (09:43) "Incrementally-shaped" does not mean slow

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    First published:
    November 6th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iMKAvHSWxSoDpBoi6/we-urgently-need-to-practice-before-we-can-pause

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    13 mins
  • "“Illegible problems” as the 2027 political boss fight" by Raemon

    "“Illegible problems” as the 2027 political boss fight" by Raemon
    Nov 8 2026
    To legislate something, it must be legible:

    Legislators (or, you know, presidents) must be able to understand a problem, and understand why a given law or decree solves that problem.

    I am pleasantly surprised that the Hugging Face outbreak made a lot of problems legible that previously required abstract reasoning. (i.e. rogue AIs are real, and they can break out of a lab before they're even finished training).

    But there are still many challenges we eventually need laws about, that require concepts that are illegible. Hard for politicians to understand. Often hard even for thoughtful intellectuals and AI safety researchers to understand (though they may disagree on which illegible problems exist and how big a deal they are).

    We need political solutions that handle this fact.

    The short takeaway is: I think "safety cases" will not work. Laws that require human judgment won't work. The details are too abstract and confusing to hold up against political and economic incentives.

    I'm optimistic we can get serious, useful AI legislation in 2027, but it must be legislation that works despite many problems remaining illegible for a long time.

    The Hugging Face outbreak made rogue AI surprisingly legible

    The [...]

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    Outline:

    (01:24) The Hugging Face outbreak made rogue AI surprisingly legible

    (02:55) What makes an illegible argument?

    (06:12) What are the remaining illegible problems?

    (06:54) Borderline legible / tricky

    (08:05) Conceptually challenging

    (12:36) Sidestepping illegibility

    (12:59) Safety cases won't work

    (13:56) An example policy that sidesteps judgement

    The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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    First published:
    November 7th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fjGgrzAkpSDouLwfx/illegible-problems-as-the-2027-political-boss-fight

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    17 mins
  • "Organizations I’d recommend for funding" by So8res

    "Organizations I’d recommend for funding" by So8res
    Nov 7 2026
    I was a grant evaluator for Lightcone Commons last round. Funders disbursed about $45mil through the program, and this included funding roughly my first 6.8 million dollars worth of recommendations. There are other projects I would've preferred to fund over what I did fund, but nobody was doing them and so they weren't on offer. Here's a series of projects that I'd fund in the next round, in rough order of priority. The next round is starting now, and is scheduled to end mid-December. I expect rounds to continue at similar speed. I expect similar amounts of funding will route through me in future rounds.

    Disclaimer: I am NOT looking to manage anyone in doing any of these projects. I am not looking to help someone get started. Initiative and leadership and management capacity (and people that can just figure out how the heck to get something done, and that have the connections to do it) are the critical bottlenecks here. I can throw money at promising pitches, but not really help them all that much otherwise.

    1. Leaders for a broad public movement against superintelligent machines. In the wake of Coxon Day, a number of random people around [...]

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    First published:
    November 3rd, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jNs9CxEbPxFdjnGA2/organizations-i-d-recommend-for-funding

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    8 mins
  • "People Should Resolve Tensions In AI Safety Research" by David Africa

    "People Should Resolve Tensions In AI Safety Research" by David Africa
    Nov 6 2026
    By now, there are lots of AI safety research papers, more than what is reasonable for a single person to read. This will get worse as the machines get better at AI safety research, and as more talent and resources pour into the field. But the "paper" is an arbitrary unit, we really care about if we make progress on an "uncertainty" or an "issue", which papers provide heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory evidence towards. Right now, I loosely claim that we should have more short writeups that simply compile evidence from papers (particularly contradictory evidence), and reconcile them into an answer for a question.

    Why?

    1. Object level, it's good for the field.
      1. It's hard to sift through all these papers! Organising them is useful and saves time.
      2. Orienting towards research questions is a good way to organise our understanding so that we can productively identify gaps and write papers. This was partly what motivated Stress-Testing Alignment Midtraining.
      3. Interesting progress comes out of contradictions, where people have differing intuitions and experimental results. Methodological errors can also be exposed if we have two things that should be the same, but are actually different.
    2. It's good for field-building reasons.
      1. [...]
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    First published:
    November 5th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tn4WSyrqr7ozGLjRy/people-should-resolve-tensions-in-ai-safety-research

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    10 mins