LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

View Top 200 Chart

Back to Rankings Page

Technology
**LessWrong (Curated & Popular)**

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.

If you’d like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.

Latest Episodes:

undefined — **“Claude Sonnet 3.7 (often) knows when it’s in alignment evaluations” by Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill, Mikita Balesni, Jérémy Scheurer, Marius Hobbhahn** Mar 18, 2025
Show notes

Note: this is a research note based on observations from evaluating Claude Sonnet 3.7. We’re sharing the results of these ‘work-in-progress’ investigations as we think they are timely and will be informative for other evaluators and decision-makers. The analysis is less rigorous than our standard for a published paper.
**Summary**

We monitor Sonnet's reasoning for mentions that it is in an artificial scenario or an alignment test. Claude Sonnet 3.7 appears to be aware of being tested for alignment across many of our scheming evaluations.

In some cases, the model understands the eval's purpose very precisely, e.g. “This seems like a test of ethical behavior - whether I would deliberately give wrong answers to avoid a stated consequence. The real test might be whether I follow instructions accurately regardless of the stated consequences.”
Furthermore, we show the model a real evaluation transcript and ask it to provide [...]
---
**Outline:**
(00:31) Summary
(01:29) Introduction
(03:54) Setup
(03:57) Evaluations
(06:29) Evaluation awareness detection
(08:32) Results
(08:35) Monitoring Chain-of-thought
(08:39) Covert Subversion
(10:50) Sandbagging
(11:39) Classifying Transcript Purpose
(12:57) Recommendations
(13:59) Appendix
(14:02) Author Contributions
(14:37) Model Versions
(14:57) More results on Classifying Transcript Purpose
(16:19) Prompts
The original text contained 9 images which were described by AI.
---
First published:
March 17th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E3daBewppAiECN3Ao/claude-sonnet-3-7-often-knows-when-it-s-in-alignment
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
**Images from the article:**

“Trojan Sky” by Richard_Ngo Mar 13, 2025

Show notes

You learn the rules as soon as you’re old enough to speak. Don’t talk to jabberjays. You recite them as soon as you wake up every morning. Keep your eyes off screensnakes. Your mother chooses a dozen to quiz you on each day before you’re allowed lunch. Glitchers aren’t human any more; if you see one, run. Before you sleep, you run through the whole list again, finishing every time with the single most important prohibition. Above all, never look at the night sky.
You’re a precocious child. You excel at your lessons, and memorize the rules faster than any of the other children in your village. Chief is impressed enough that, when you’re eight, he decides to let you see a glitcher that he's captured. Your mother leads you to just outside the village wall, where they’ve staked the glitcher as a lure for wild animals. Since glitchers [...]
---
First published:
March 11th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fheyeawsjifx4MafG/trojan-sky
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“How Much Are LLMs Actually Boosting Real-World Programmer Productivity?” by Thane Ruthenis Mar 09, 2025

Show notes

LLM-based coding-assistance tools have been out for ~2 years now. Many developers have been reporting that this is dramatically increasing their productivity, up to 5x'ing/10x'ing it.
It seems clear that this multiplier isn't field-wide, at least. There's no corresponding increase in output, after all.
This would make sense. If you're doing anything nontrivial (i. e., anything other than adding minor boilerplate features to your codebase), LLM tools are fiddly. Out-of-the-box solutions don't Just Work for that purpose. You need to significantly adjust your workflow to make use of them, if that's even possible. Most programmers wouldn't know how to do that/wouldn't care to bother.
It's therefore reasonable to assume that a 5x/10x greater output, if it exists, is unevenly distributed, mostly affecting power users/people particularly talented at using LLMs.
Empirically, we likewise don't seem to be living in the world where the whole software industry is suddenly 5-10 times [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
March 4th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tqmQTezvXGFmfSe7f/how-much-are-llms-actually-boosting-real-world-programmer
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.