Episodes

  • "2025 in AI predictions" by jessicata

    "2025 in AI predictions" by jessicata
    Jan 3 2026
    Past years: 2023 2024

    Continuing a yearly tradition, I evaluate AI predictions from past years, and collect a convenience sample of AI predictions made this year. In terms of selection, I prefer selecting specific predictions, especially ones made about the near term, enabling faster evaluation.

    Evaluated predictions made about 2025 in 2023, 2024, or 2025 mostly overestimate AI capabilities advances, although there's of course a selection effect (people making notable predictions about the near-term are more likely to believe AI will be impressive near-term).

    As time goes on, "AGI" becomes a less useful term, so operationalizing predictions is especially important. In terms of predictions made in 2025, there is a significant cluster of people predicting very large AI effects by 2030. Observations in the coming years will disambiguate.

    Predictions about 2025

    2023

    Jessica Taylor: "Wouldn't be surprised if this exact prompt got solved, but probably something nearby that's easy for humans won't be solved?"

    The prompt: "Find a sequence of words that is: - 20 words long - contains exactly 2 repetitions of the same word twice in a row - contains exactly 2 repetitions of the same word thrice in a row"

    Self-evaluation: False; I underestimated LLM progress [...]

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    Outline:

    (01:09) Predictions about 2025

    (03:35) Predictions made in 2025 about 2025

    (05:31) Predictions made in 2025

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    First published:
    January 1st, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/69qnNx8S7wkSKXJFY/2025-in-ai-predictions

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    22 mins
  • "Good if make prior after data instead of before" by dynomight

    "Good if make prior after data instead of before" by dynomight
    Dec 27 2025
    They say you’re supposed to choose your prior in advance. That's why it's called a “prior”. First, you’re supposed to say say how plausible different things are, and then you update your beliefs based on what you see in the world.

    For example, currently you are—I assume—trying to decide if you should stop reading this post and do something else with your life. If you’ve read this blog before, then lurking somewhere in your mind is some prior for how often my posts are good. For the sake of argument, let's say you think 25% of my posts are funny and insightful and 75% are boring and worthless.

    OK. But now here you are reading these words. If they seem bad/good, then that raises the odds that this particular post is worthless/non-worthless. For the sake of argument again, say you find these words mildly promising, meaning that a good post is 1.5× more likely than a worthless post to contain words with this level of quality.

    If you combine those two assumptions, that implies that the probability that this particular post is good is 33.3%. That's true because the red rectangle below has half the area of the blue [...]

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    Outline:

    (03:28) Aliens

    (07:06) More aliens

    (09:28) Huh?

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    First published:
    December 18th, 2025

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JAA2cLFH7rLGNCeCo/good-if-make-prior-after-data-instead-of-before

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    18 mins
  • "Measuring no CoT math time horizon (single forward pass)" by ryan_greenblatt

    "Measuring no CoT math time horizon (single forward pass)" by ryan_greenblatt
    Dec 27 2025
    A key risk factor for scheming (and misalignment more generally) is opaque reasoning ability.One proxy for this is how good AIs are at solving math problems immediately without any chain-of-thought (CoT) (as in, in a single forward pass).I've measured this on a dataset of easy math problems and used this to estimate 50% reliability no-CoT time horizon using the same methodology introduced in Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks (the METR time horizon paper).

    Important caveat: To get human completion times, I ask Opus 4.5 (with thinking) to estimate how long it would take the median AIME participant to complete a given problem.These times seem roughly reasonable to me, but getting some actual human baselines and using these to correct Opus 4.5's estimates would be better.

    Here are the 50% reliability time horizon results:

    I find that Opus 4.5 has a no-CoT 50% reliability time horizon of 3.5 minutes and that time horizon has been doubling every 9 months.

    In an earlier post (Recent LLMs can leverage filler tokens or repeated problems to improve (no-CoT) math performance), I found that repeating the problem substantially boosts performance.In the above plot, if [...]

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    Outline:

    (02:33) Some details about the time horizon fit and data

    (04:17) Analysis

    (06:59) Appendix: scores for Gemini 3 Pro

    (11:41) Appendix: full result tables

    (11:46) Time Horizon - Repetitions

    (12:07) Time Horizon - Filler

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

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    First published:
    December 26th, 2025

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ty5Bmg7P6Tciy2uj2/measuring-no-cot-math-time-horizon-single-forward-pass

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    13 mins
  • "Recent LLMs can use filler tokens or problem repeats to improve (no-CoT) math performance" by ryan_greenblatt

    "Recent LLMs can use filler tokens or problem repeats to improve (no-CoT) math performance" by ryan_greenblatt
    Dec 23 2025
    Prior results have shown that LLMs released before 2024 can't leverage 'filler tokens'—unrelated tokens prior to the model's final answer—to perform additional computation and improve performance.[1]I did an investigation on more recent models (e.g. Opus 4.5) and found that many recent LLMs improve substantially on math problems when given filler tokens.That is, I force the LLM to answer some math question immediately without being able to reason using Chain-of-Thought (CoT), but do give the LLM filter tokens (e.g., text like "Filler: 1 2 3 ...") before it has to answer.Giving Opus 4.5 filler tokens[2] boosts no-CoT performance from 45% to 51% (p=4e-7) on a dataset of relatively easy (competition) math problems[3].I find a similar effect from repeating the problem statement many times, e.g. Opus 4.5's no-CoT performance is boosted from 45% to 51%.

    Repeating the problem statement generally works better and is more reliable than filler tokens, especially for relatively weaker models I test (e.g. Qwen3 235B A22B), though the performance boost is often very similar, especially for Anthropic models.The first model that is measurably uplifted by repeats/filler is Opus 3, so this effect has been around for a [...]

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    Outline:

    (03:59) Datasets

    (06:01) Prompt

    (06:58) Results

    (07:01) Performance vs number of repeats/filler

    (08:29) Alternative types of filler tokens

    (09:03) Minimal comparison on many models

    (10:05) Relative performance improvement vs default absolute performance

    (13:59) Comparing filler vs repeat

    (14:44) Future work

    (15:53) Appendix: How helpful were AIs for this project?

    (16:44) Appendix: more information about Easy-Comp-Math

    (25:05) Appendix: tables with exact values

    (25:11) Gen-Arithmetic - Repetitions

    (25:36) Gen-Arithmetic - Filler

    (25:59) Easy-Comp-Math - Repetitions

    (26:21) Easy-Comp-Math - Filler

    (26:45) Partial Sweep - Gen-Arithmetic - Repetitions

    (27:07) Partial Sweep - Gen-Arithmetic - Filler

    (27:27) Partial Sweep - Easy-Comp-Math - Repetitions

    (27:48) Partial Sweep - Easy-Comp-Math - Filler

    (28:09) Appendix: more plots

    (28:14) Relative accuracy improvement plots

    (29:05) Absolute accuracy improvement plots

    (29:57) Filler vs repeat comparison plots

    (30:02) Absolute

    (30:30) Relative

    (30:58) Appendix: significance matrices

    (31:03) Easy-Comp-Math - Repetitions

    (32:27) Easy-Comp-Math - Filler

    (33:50) Gen-Arithmetic - Repetitions

    (35:12) Gen-Arithmetic - Filler

    The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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    First published:
    December 22nd, 2025

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NYzYJ2WoB74E6uj9L/recent-llms-can-use-filler-tokens-or-problem-repeats-to

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    37 mins
  • "Turning 20 in the probable pre-apocalypse" by Parv Mahajan

    "Turning 20 in the probable pre-apocalypse" by Parv Mahajan
    Dec 23 2025
    Master version of this on https://parvmahajan.com/2025/12/21/turning-20.html

    I turn 20 in January, and the world looks very strange. Probably, things will change very quickly. Maybe, one of those things is whether or not we’re still here.

    This moment seems very fragile, and perhaps more than most moments will never happen again. I want to capture a little bit of what it feels like to be alive right now.

    1.

    Everywhere around me there is this incredible sense of freefall and of grasping. I realize with excitement and horror that over a semester Claude went from not understanding my homework to easily solving it, and I recognize this is the most normal things will ever be. Suddenly, the ceiling for what is possible seems so high - my classmates join startups, accelerate their degrees; I find myself building bespoke bioinformatics tools in minutes, running month-long projects in days. I write dozens of emails and thousands of lines of code a week, and for the first time I no longer feel limited by my ability but by my willpower. I spread the gospel to my friends - “there has never been a better time to have a problem” - even as [...]

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    Outline:

    (00:34) 1.

    (03:12) 2.

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    First published:
    December 21st, 2025

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/S5dnLsmRbj2JkLWvf/turning-20-in-the-probable-pre-apocalypse

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    5 mins
  • "Alignment Pretraining: AI Discourse Causes Self-Fulfilling (Mis)alignment" by Cam, Puria Radmard, Kyle O’Brien, David Africa, Samuel Ratnam, andyk

    "Alignment Pretraining: AI Discourse Causes Self-Fulfilling (Mis)alignment" by Cam, Puria Radmard, Kyle O’Brien, David Africa, Samuel Ratnam, andyk
    Dec 23 2025
    TL;DR

    LLMs pretrained on data about misaligned AIs themselves become less aligned. Luckily, pretraining LLMs with synthetic data about good AIs helps them become more aligned. These alignment priors persist through post-training, providing alignment-in-depth. We recommend labs pretrain for alignment, just as they do for capabilities.

    Website: alignmentpretraining.ai
    Us: geodesicresearch.org | x.com/geodesresearch

    Note: We are currently garnering feedback here before submitting to ICML. Any suggestions here or on our Google Doc are welcome! We will be releasing a revision on arXiv in the coming days. Folks who leave feedback will be added to the Acknowledgment section. Thank you!

    Abstract

    We pretrained a suite of 6.9B-parameter LLMs, varying only the content related to AI systems, and evaluated them for misalignment. When filtering the vast majority of the content related to AI, we see significant decreases in misalignment rates. The opposite was also true - synthetic positive AI data led to self-fulfilling alignment.

    While post-training decreased the effect size, benign fine-tuning[1] degrades the effects of post-training, models revert toward their midtraining misalignment rates. Models pretrained on realistic or artificial upsampled negative AI discourse become more misaligned with benign fine-tuning, while models pretrained on only positive AI discourse become more aligned.

    This [...]



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    Outline:

    (00:15) TL;DR

    (01:10) Abstract

    (02:52) Background and Motivation

    (04:38) Methodology

    (04:41) Misalignment Evaluations

    (06:39) Synthetic AI Discourse Generation

    (07:57) Data Filtering

    (08:27) Training Setup

    (09:06) Post-Training

    (09:37) Results

    (09:41) Base Models: AI Discourse Causally Affects Alignment

    (10:50) Post-Training: Effects Persist

    (12:14) Tampering: Pretraining Provides Alignment-In-Depth

    (14:10) Additional Results

    (15:23) Discussion

    (15:26) Pretraining as Creating Good Alignment Priors

    (16:09) Curation Outperforms Naive Filtering

    (17:07) Alignment Pretraining

    (17:28) Limitations

    (18:16) Next Steps and Call for Feedback

    (19:18) Acknowledgements

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

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    First published:
    December 20th, 2025

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TcfyGD2aKdZ7Rt3hk/alignment-pretraining-ai-discourse-causes-self-fulfilling

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    21 mins
  • "Dancing in a World of Horseradish" by lsusr

    "Dancing in a World of Horseradish" by lsusr
    Dec 22 2025
    Commercial airplane tickets are divided up into coach, business class, and first class. In 2014, Etihad introduced The Residence, a premium experience above first class. The Residence isn't very popular.

    The reason The Residence isn't very popular is because of economics. A Residence flight is almost as expensive as a private charter jet. Private jets aren't just a little bit better than commercial flights. They're a totally different product. The airplane waits for you, and you don't have to go through TSA (or Un-American equivalent). The differences between flying coach and flying on The Residence are small compared to the difference between flying on The Residence and flying a low-end charter jet.

    It's difficult to compare costs of big airlines vs private jets for a myriad of reasons. The exact details of this graph should not be taken seriously. I'm just trying to give a visual representation of how a price bifurcation works. Even in the rare situations where it's slightly cheaper than a private jet, nobody should buy them. Rich people should just rent low-end private jets, and poor people shouldn't buy anything more expensive than first class tickets. Why was Etihad's silly product created? Mostly for the halo [...]

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    Outline:

    (01:55) Definition

    (03:16) Product Bifurcation

    (04:55) The Death of Live Music

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    First published:
    December 16th, 2025

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7zkFzDAjGGLzab4LH/dancing-in-a-world-of-horseradish

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    8 mins
  • "Contradict my take on OpenPhil’s past AI beliefs" by Eliezer Yudkowsky

    "Contradict my take on OpenPhil’s past AI beliefs" by Eliezer Yudkowsky
    Dec 21 2025
    At many points now, I've been asked in private for a critique of EA / EA's history / EA's impact and I have ad-libbed statements that I feel guilty about because they have not been subjected to EA critique and refutation. I need to write up my take and let you all try to shoot it down.

    Before I can or should try to write up that take, I need to fact-check one of my take-central beliefs about how the last couple of decades have gone down. My belief is that the Open Philanthropy Project, EA generally, and Oxford EA particularly, had bad AI timelines and bad ASI ruin conditional probabilities; and that these invalidly arrived-at beliefs were in control of funding, and were explicitly publicly promoted at the expense of saner beliefs.

    An exemplar of OpenPhil / Oxford EA reasoning about timelines is that, as late as 2020, their position on timelines seemed to center on Ajeya Cotra's "Biological Timelines" estimate which put median timelines to AGI at 30 years later. Leadership dissent from this viewpoint, as I recall, generally centered on having longer rather than shorter median timelines.

    An exemplar of poor positioning on AI ruin is [...]

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    First published:
    December 20th, 2025

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpguaocJ4y7E3ccuw/contradict-my-take-on-openphil-s-past-ai-beliefs

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    6 mins