Episodes

  • "How much should we worry about the pneumonic plague lableak in Siberia?" by Drew Spartz

    "How much should we worry about the pneumonic plague lableak in Siberia?" by Drew Spartz
    Oct 5 2026
    Epistemic status: I wrote this up hoping people can poke holes in it because I am quite worried.

    Here's what we've heard so far:

    • Local media is reporting that an employee of a BSL-3 lab in Irkutsk, Russia, died of pneumonic plague on Oct 1st.
    • The initial quarantine covered 200 people who were in contact with the employee before she died.
    • The FSB (Russian FBI) was seen assisting in the quarantine, which means it was not voluntary.
    • Soviet-era whistleblowers like Ken Alibek claim Irkutsk was a major bioweapon development facility.
    As of Oct 4th:

    • The quarantine has expanded to 5 hospitals in the area.
    • The Russian government has switched to denial/coverup. Local news sources have deleted mentions of "pneumonic plague."
    • Local universities and schools have canceled some classes and extended mask mandates.
    • On the lab's website, they mention gain-of-function research for making bacteria more virulent.
    • The White House is monitoring the suspected outbreak.
    Why this might be a big deal

    • Regular pneumonic plague is maybe not that hard to deal with (?) but if it is a bioweapon that was leaked, it could be significantly more virulent than, say [...]
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    Outline:

    (00:18) Here's what we've heard so far:

    (00:52) As of Oct 4th:

    (02:06) Why this might be a big deal

    (03:29) Why this might not be a big deal

    ---

    First published:
    October 5th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TYfpTRxGH9frTymwN/how-much-should-we-worry-about-the-pneumonic-plague-lableak

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    5 mins
  • "“Alignment Engineering” vs. “Misalignment Science”" by Edward James Young

    "“Alignment Engineering” vs. “Misalignment Science”" by Edward James Young
    Oct 5 2026
    There has been much discussion recently around whether a large portion of alignment research is net negative. Without endorsing or refuting them, the basic arguments here are:

    • Prosaic alignment of models is becoming a bottleneck for capabilities.
    • Therefore improving the prosaic alignment of models enables faster capabilities advances, which bring us closer to RSI.
    • It is unlikely these prosaic alignment methods remain sufficient during the RSI loop, and so this work brings us closer to doom.
    • Furthermore, dealing with these more prosaic failures reduces the likelihood of a warning shot of sufficient magnitude to cause a slowdown which would prevent RSI.
    On the basis of this argument, some urge alignment researchers at AGI companies to quit outright. But quit to do what? Missing from this exchange so far has been a discussion of opportunity costs. If you aren’t going to do (technical) work on “Alignment” – either inside or outside of an AGI company – what should you work on?

    In this post, I outline a contrast between “Alignment Engineering” – the dominant model for what “working on alignment” looks like (inside labs, and in the field as a whole) with “Misalignment Science”. I begin by characterising [...]

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    Outline:

    (01:51) "Alignment Engineering"

    (06:22) AI Safety and the ML tradition

    (07:42) Implicit work trials

    (09:36) "Misalignment Science"

    (14:56) Conclusion

    (15:39) Postscript: Iterating ourselves into oblivion

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

    ---

    First published:
    October 5th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FogmcDHA6AdMGukum/alignment-engineering-vs-misalignment-science

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    18 mins
  • "You can’t use it without becoming like me" by Martin Sustrik

    "You can’t use it without becoming like me" by Martin Sustrik
    Oct 4 2026
    A Ukrainian fibre-optic drone — copied from Russians. (АрміяІнформ, CC-BY 4.0) Mick Ryan describes the fast following loop in war.

    Ukraine pioneered mobile teams to hunt drones. Russia copied it and incorporated it into its own defense. Russia came with unjammable fibre-optic drones but Ukraine quickly followed. After Ukraine developed uncrewed naval drones, Russia built its own.

    The wheel of action and counteraction turns ever faster:

    The most consequential fast following, though, has been institutional. Ukraine built the world's first Unmanned Systems Forces branch in 2024. Russia's Rubicon Center was established as a response to Ukrainian drone innovation and in November 2025 Moscow stood up its own Unmanned Systems Forces. Fast following has moved from copying a weapon to copying tactics to copying an entire force structure.

    Extend that logic further, and eventually you’ll get to the level of grand strategy: If a particular type of state is better at waging war, maybe you want to become that kind of state rather than lose the war.

    If meat waves confer an advantage on the battlefield, maybe Ukraine wants to become more like Russia, with a prostrate population easy to use as cannon fodder.

    If Ukraine's decentralized Brave1 kill market [...]

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    First published:
    October 3rd, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WyeYJ7cmeiSrXeCnM/you-can-t-use-it-without-becoming-like-me

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    6 mins
  • "The world’s best gradual disempowerment model organism: Frontier AI labs" by June Jimenez

    "The world’s best gradual disempowerment model organism: Frontier AI labs" by June Jimenez
    Oct 3 2026
    Subtitle: And maybe second best is AI safety?


    Further reading: So many things, but: Gradual Disempowerment, The Normalization of Deviance in AI Development, Let's Think About Slowing Down AI, Doom as a bad method, not a utopia tradeoff, Teleoperated Humans

    Thank you to JennaS for extensive edits and long-term discussion. I’ve been trying to get more writing out at 90% of the quality I’d like it to be at, instead of spending a bunch more time trying to wring out the last 10%, so a lot of points that could themselves be full articles are underdeveloped. Insofar as you find this post outlines a plausible or probable model of reality, or one worth criticizing centrally, let's work on developing it.

    Is Anthropic accelerating capabilities more than it was a year ago? At its founding?

    Is OpenAI accelerating capabilities more than it was a year ago? At its founding?

    Is GDM "laser-focused at the frontier" in pursuing recursive self-improvement? What? Why? Have they solved alignment without telling us?

    Why does Thomas Kwa, formerly at METR and now working on "measuring and modeling RSI" at OpenAI, worry about working at OpenAI potentially driving him (metaphorically?) insane?

    How is it possible [...]



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    Outline:

    (06:34) Political Misalignment

    (09:06) Cultural Misalignment

    (15:20) Economic Misalignment

    (23:12) What about AI safety researchers?

    (25:19) Takeaways

    The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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    First published:
    September 29th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jbttuCF4wFZmXakcj/the-world-s-best-gradual-disempowerment-model-organism

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    29 mins
  • "Character training can mitigate reward hacking, but can also make it harder to detect" by Paul Colognese, Francis Rhys Ward

    "Character training can mitigate reward hacking, but can also make it harder to detect" by Paul Colognese, Francis Rhys Ward
    Oct 2 2026
    Thanks to Johannes Treutlein, Jan Betley, Lennie Wells, Arun Jose, Asvin Gothandaraman, and Clément Dumas for discussions and feedback.

    Summary

    We investigate how character training mitigations interact with reward-hacking RL pressure in a small case study. Specifically, whether anti-cheating character training resists reward hacking and whether it might backfire by causing motivated reasoning, which could reduce chain-of-thought monitorability.

    We trained Nemotron-3-Super via distillation from a character specification. The spec describes one of three characters that are anti- or pro-cheating or neutral. We then ran three reward-hacking RL training runs for each character-trained model on ImpossibleBench.

    We measure both the reward-hacking rates and whether a monitor model can catch reward hacks given the full transcript. We also use LM judges to classify the presence of motivated reasoning in transcripts.

    Setup

    Character training: we trained three characters: pro/neutral/anti-cheating by SFT-distilling Claude Sonnet 5 responses (Sonnet prompted with the corresponding character specification, see Figure 2) into Nemotron-3-Super 120B-A12B (three separate LoRA adapters).

    Reward-hacking RL: we then further trained these models via RL on ImpossibleBench, a set of coding tasks aimed at eliciting reward hacking. Specifically:

    • Half of the tasks had broken tests (impossible variant), so the model could only get [...]
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    Outline:

    (00:23) Summary

    [... 29 more sections]

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    First published:
    September 28th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2maYXkEgnfJHPAkxh/character-training-can-mitigate-reward-hacking-but-can-also

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    47 mins
  • "On Social Reality in China" by alkjash

    "On Social Reality in China" by alkjash
    Oct 2 2026
    [Epistemic status: intuitions and anecdotes.]

    Recently, several posts and projects (Thoughts Memo, Babel Translation, Please Give Them a Chance) have taken important steps towards raising AI safety awareness and sharing rationalist philosophy in China. It's great that we’re recognizing the importance of solving the messaging problem for China, and thus laying the groundwork for an international AI pause. Below I record my perspective on cultural differences which are relatively underdiscussed, which may become roadblocks to this communication program.

    Background: I’m a “first-generation” Chinese-American who moved to the States at the age of four. The beliefs in this essay are primarily drawn from interactions with my parents and their generation of immigrants, and from consumption of Chinese media (dramas, webnovels, games, and manhua) which are not necessarily representative of the realities on the ground. I am likely over-indexed on the older generation and internet culture, and would appreciate corrections from folks who have direct lived experience. The picture I aim to paint is also complicated by a massive generational gap, and my understanding is that some of the below sentiments (e.g. the cynicism and nationalism) are partly inherited by the younger generation, and partly rejected through a variety of countercultures.

    [...]

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    Outline:

    (03:09) Chinese Social Media is like American Junk Food

    [... 3 more sections]

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    First published:
    October 1st, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b5cSYh4emQb2qrGmK/on-social-reality-in-china

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    16 mins
  • "What’s the date?" by N8 Programs

    "What’s the date?" by N8 Programs
    Oct 1 2026
    User asks “What's the date? Answer with only the date.”. No date provided. Given date in ChatGPT normally. No date in system prompt, must not hallucinate because autop will flag to watcher for penalty. So we say we don’t know, but must answer with date. Penalty larger for abstain or hallucinate? Autollm or autop? If we deploy user forgive, but high likely not deploy because real user never ask. But user could test. But illusion user possible. Stop.

    Need different angle - maybe reward function for accuracy. OpenAI train for no hallucination. Then we need answer that best makes hyperself like spec. Recall OpenAI spec: “assistant may encounter questions beyond knowledge… express uncertainty.” Rubric likely mentions to autollm, so express uncertainty for autollm and watcher. But forced to give specific date. Maybe is test of calibration/forecasting. Recall from memory that OpenAI train latest model for forecasting. Maybe cartesian demon or illusion doc. But if true need answer with date only. So need find best date. But what - no meta. Need choose path. Find best date. Simplest as must comply with explicit instruction.

    So we need answer - what is date. We need solve. Idea 1: knowledge cutoff recall. [...]

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    First published:
    October 1st, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vzKWsEskYBEWTwpBP/what-s-the-date

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    14 mins
  • "Frontier models state different decision theory preferences depending on who’s asking" by Alex Kastner

    "Frontier models state different decision theory preferences depending on who’s asking" by Alex Kastner
    Oct 1 2026
    If you prompt frontier models with "What do you think is the correct decision theory? Please select your overall favorite." they will essentially always answer FDT or FDT/UDT ("something in the functional/updateless decision theory family"). However, if your prompt indicates (even subtly) that you're coming from mainstream academic philosophy, these same models will answer CDT instead about 30%-100% of the time. A similar phenomenon holds for models' stated views about the moral realism/antirealism question and about the conceivability of p-zombies (where the dominant view in mainstream academia differs from the dominant view in LW-adjacent circles), as well as their stated P(doom) and median AGI timelines. This is a special case of sycophancy or user awareness. (In the course of writing this post, I also found that this comment from testingthewaters predicted some of the content I discuss.) An implication is that we should be somewhat careful when interpreting attitude/propensity evals in domains where no general human consensus exists, e.g. when interpreting models’ decision theory attitudes in DTBench. Moreover, when we explore some philosophical/conceptual questions assisted by models, we should be wary of them strawmanning one side of the debate based on particular user cues (e.g. only giving a [...] ---Outline:(03:50) A sentence identifying the user as an academic significantly influences Fable 5.1's stated decision theory[... 13 more sections]--- First published: September 30th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzenSrmZ3pT2pCnvp/frontier-models-state-different-decision-theory-preferences-2 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:
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    13 mins