Episodes

  • "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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    Images from the article:

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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
  • "Gears for political races" by Tom Smith

    "Gears for political races" by Tom Smith
    Jun 19 2026
    In the past few years, many people around me have tried to convince me that US electoral politics is important. But like many other people in the community, I’ve been suspicious of many of the high-level arguments that I’ve heard. It felt like people were pulling numbers out of poorly-documented models I didn’t have time to examine and citing studies I didn’t have time to read. But I lacked a gears-level model of why and how individual efforts could impact electoral outcomes, and I felt intimidated by all the statistics and skeptical of trusting people adjacent to politics.

    In the past year, as I’ve done more research and (more recently) volunteered on the ground to help Alex Bores's campaign in NY-12[1] (the guy who passed the RAISE Act and is now being targeted by the giant A16Z, Greg Brockman, Joe Lonsdale Super PAC), I’ve developed a gears-level understanding of how electoral politics in the US works.

    I now believe that working on US electoral politics is one of the highest impact areas from the general AIS perspective. I feel like I was a fool. In this post, I’ll share some of the gears I’ve learned that inform this belief [...]

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    Outline:

    (01:20) ~2% of open-seat primaries come down to 100 votes or less

    (02:52) Talking to voters can net 1/3rd of a vote each hour

    (05:32) Getting people to bother voting at all is a good strategy

    (06:09) Campaigns are very money-constrained, which costs them time

    (10:01) Returns don't really diminish

    (11:24) There's lots of opportunities to be clever in ways that make you 50% more effective at canvassing

    (11:49) If you're motivated and deeply care, you can greatly outperform the majority of volunteers

    (13:21) Yes, when people spend tons to support/oppose a candidate, it has a notable effect

    (15:16) Donations > reaching out to friends/warm contacts > canvassing > ~anything else an average person can do

    (18:41) People over-fixate on vibes and win vs loss

    (21:12) Some interventions feel like they don't work but the numbers say otherwise

    (21:59) Seriously, a group of agentic people can be an enormous political force

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    First published:
    June 17th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nSqB3qYP36enJLRq2/gears-for-political-races

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    Images from the article:

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    24 mins
  • "A frontier AI company should shut down" by MichaelDickens

    "A frontier AI company should shut down" by MichaelDickens
    Jun 16 2026
    Cross-posted from my website.

    Prior discussion: niplav's shortform (2025); Planning for Extreme AI Risks (2025) by Joshua Clymer

    A frontier AI company (any one, I don't care which) should close shop and make an announcement along the lines of:

    Powerful AI could end the human race. We are too worried that we don't know how to make this technology safe. We have decided to shut down because we don't want to be responsible for building the thing that kills us all.

    A common refrain among safety-conscious AI developers: "it doesn't matter if we stop building dangerous AI, because someone else will just build it instead." Is that really true, though? If a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company comes out and says "We've concluded that our product is horribly dangerous, nobody knows how to make it safe, and there's too high a risk that it leads to human extinction", this won't raise any eyebrows? This has no chance of spurring policy-makers into action?

    Shutting down would make people say, holy shit, they are serious about this extinction risk thing. Shutting down sends a strong signal to governments that they should pay serious attention to AI x-risk.

    It [...]

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

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    First published:
    June 15th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bStYDEy8PQPt2c3Za/a-frontier-ai-company-should-shut-down

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    5 mins
  • "Sympathy for both sides of the egregious misalignment debate" by Steven Byrnes

    "Sympathy for both sides of the egregious misalignment debate" by Steven Byrnes
    Jun 13 2026
    On one side of this debate is Yudkowsky & Soares, who think that (if AI progress continues) we’re on a direct path to egregiously-misaligned, scheming, out-of-control, rogue superintelligence (ASI), not even slightly nice, in the absence of yet-to-be-invented breakthrough technical alignment ideas.

    On the other side of this debate is almost everyone who works on or studies LLMs. Some of them are very concerned about egregious scheming, others much less so, and as a group they’re equally or more concerned about lots of other potential AI problems—AI-assisted bioterrorism, AI-assisted dictatorships, etc. And if they’re concerned about egregious misalignment and scheming, they’ll probably say that it would come about through race dynamics, careless programmers, bad actors, etc., as opposed to the simpler Yudkowsky & Soares story of “we get egregious misalignment and scheming because nobody has the faintest clue how to avoid that”.

    Here's my brief idiosyncratic take on this debate. I think BOTH of the following are true:

    • (1) If you really think carefully about the properties of ASI, you really do find good reasons to strongly expect it to be egregiously misaligned, scheming, and ruthless, in the absence of yet-to-be-invented breakthrough technical alignment ideas.
    • (2) If you [...]
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    Outline:

    (01:58) Yudkowsky & Soares's position \[caricatured\]:

    (03:18) LLM people's position \[caricatured\]:

    (04:09) Conclusion

    (04:19) Bonus section: Further commentary

    (04:28) My "true objection" to Yudkowsky & Soares:

    (05:04) My within-frame complaint at Yudkowsky & Soares:

    (06:42) My "true objection" to LLM people:

    (07:11) My within-frame complaint at LLM people:

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    First published:
    June 12th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DZaZ3fqHnvfLCftPu/sympathy-for-both-sides-of-the-egregious-misalignment-debate

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    9 mins
  • "PSA: Almost nobody is working on alignment" by Chi Nguyen, peterbarnett

    "PSA: Almost nobody is working on alignment" by Chi Nguyen, peterbarnett
    Jun 12 2026
    People often assume that a large fraction of the AI safety community works on alignment. As far as we're aware, this is not true. Most people are not working on making sure superintelligent AIs are aligned with human values or follow human instructions.

    Currently, the people who work on alignment are roughly:

    • The Alignment Research Center who work on a research bet by Paul Christiano
    • Probably Sequent who just got announced yesterday
    • Some scattered people who work at universities or independently, some of whom hang around Berkeley
    A lot of the remainder of the AI safety community does indirect work like capability evaluations, risk assessments, control, policy, AI science, understanding misalignment (which maybe should partially count as alignment work), demos and so on.

    Some production alignment work (i.e., making current models behave well) might help with more ambitious alignment, too (e.g., some COT-monitoring). Many people also work on aligning current/next-generation models so that these models help with aligning future models, and hope this scales to superintelligence.

    We are not necessarily saying this is bad and that people are making a big mistake (e.g., neither of us work on alignment) but it's a notable fact that seems good to [...]

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    First published:
    June 12th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJo2qsEdib8RZLvW6/psa-almost-nobody-is-working-on-alignment

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    2 mins