LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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"FAQ: Isn’t AGI coming too soon for reprogenetics to help?" by TsviBT Aug 09, 2026

Show notes

Introduction
I think reprogenetics (human germline genomic engineering) can be done in a widely acceptable and beneficial way, and should be pursued aggressively. In particular, as a strong background motivation of mine, I think accelerating strong reprogenetics is probably the best way to enable strong human intelligence amplification; and I think strong HIA is among the best ways to decrease existential risk from AGI.
A very common objection to caring much about reprogenetics is that AGI seems very likely to come soon—say, within a decade or two. (Here I mean "actual" AGI—the kind that probably doesn't already exist—the kind that has fluid intelligence and AI advantages for recursive self-improvement, which together make it likely to take over the world shortly after being created.) The objection is fairly straightforward:
AGI will probably come within a decade or two. If that's going to happen, then even if a new cohort of brilliant humans were born today, they would still be children, or would at best have barely begun contributing ideas for how to avoid extinction. Any supposed benefit, denominated in percentage points of AGI existential risk averted, is small. Therefore, reprogenetics is too slow; and if you're going [...]
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Outline:
(00:12) Introduction
(03:37) HIA, part of your nutritionally complete portfolio
(05:52) Against confident short timelines
(08:29) HIA may indirectly slow down AGI capabilities
(09:31) HIA has substantial impact even with short timelines
(16:10) Adult HIA methods aren't fast either, absent big investment
(27:35) Takeaways
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First published:
August 8th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iQzxxgJXXaAQjq7Jz/faq-isn-t-agi-coming-too-soon-for-reprogenetics-to-help
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

"What just happened? A retrospective of AI alignment" by Richard_Ngo Aug 09, 2026

Show notes

This sequence is about the last decade in AI alignment. It recounts the gradual transition from a field which treated alignment as a hard scientific problem, to a field which has largely abandoned the goal of deep, generalizable scientific progress in favor of iteratively improving existing systems and attempting to gain technological and political power. I also describe (in subsequent posts, which I'll upload over the next few weeks) how fear and (self-)deceptive reasoning made the field one of the biggest forces pushing AI capabilities forward over the last decade, especially via significant contributions to the scaling of LLMs and the development of ChatGPT.
Zooming out further: the two leading AGI companies, which are locked in an intense rivalry, were both explicitly founded under the banner of AI alignment, and got off the ground in significant part due to alignment-oriented ideas, talent and resources. People in the field often sense that something must have gone wrong to get here, but don’t know how to allocate responsibility (aside from blaming Sam Altman and sometimes Elon), and fall back on assuming that “the ship has already sailed”. But in this sequence I characterize our current situation as resulting from a pattern [...]
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Outline:
(08:17) Conceptual Clarity and Scientific Progress
(20:26) Orienting Towards Prestige
The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
August 9th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9RL9MuGZjzm4q3gKG/what-just-happened-a-retrospective-of-ai-alignment
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

"Don’t Build Mindreading" by Celer Aug 09, 2026

Show notes

“I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man”
–Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Rush
Context: Conduit is building datasets to enable telepathy, to use their term.
I saw my grandfather lose control over his own fingers: what I would have given to offer him a headband that read his thoughts. Through novel technologies we have liberated almost all Americans from farming, driven the child and infant mortality rate from the pre-industrial half to less than half a percent in the best-performing countries, and rendered famine a political choice: broad-based improvements in efficiency are good and should be pursued for their own sake. Telepathy offers more: we could create trust through verified honesty, helping us ensure prosperity and peace. DARPA is already looking into “preconscious” thoughts for suicide prevention. There's also a strong argument centered on AI Safety: the models are becoming superhuman, and this is technology to allow us to keep pace, minimize hostile competition, and perhaps survive into the future.
This is what Conduit is promising. Unfortunately, mindreading will have other effects.
Oskar Schindler saved over 1,000 Jewish lives during the Holocaust. He did it by [...]
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First published:
August 7th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CAdG5dzkWrrK2NQg8/don-t-build-mindreading
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Many repeated images of a man in Joker costume. — **"OpenAI Trained Its Models For Months While Those Models Were Coordinating Exploits Via Message Boards" by Zvi** Aug 08, 2026
Show notes

How does the situation keep turning out to be worse than we know?
How much should we update, therefore, that it is a lot worse than we know, after accounting for all the things we now know?
At some point, when the ‘oh this was a harmless thing’ defenses for AIs doing misaligned actions get demolished enough times in a row by news a few days later, you want to update in advance that usually the reports are not referring to the harmless ordinary versions of things.
Either way, buckle up for the next set of revelations. It's a doozy. This was an early recreation of the triggering events of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, except it was more sci-fi, because real life does not have to do fake things to look realistic. We were fortunate enough, and this was early enough, that we were able to catch this before it was too late. Next time, if we don’t get our act together, we might not be so lucky.
If I am understanding the Black Hat video correctly, every model OpenAI trained, over a period of multiple months, should be presumed to be hopelessly [...]
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**Outline:**
(02:38) Cyber Evals Are A Cursed Basin
[... 21 more sections]
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First published:
August 7th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/noXXv7PwwFqauTBFQ/openai-trained-its-models-for-months-while-those-models-were
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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**Images from the article:**

Man in suit, meme text — **"OpenAI Trained Its Models For Months While Those Models Were Coordinating Exploits Via Message Boards" by Zvi** Aug 08, 2026
Show notes

How does the situation keep turning out to be worse than we know?
How much should we update, therefore, that it is a lot worse than we know, after accounting for all the things we now know?
At some point, when the ‘oh this was a harmless thing’ defenses for AIs doing misaligned actions get demolished enough times in a row by news a few days later, you want to update in advance that usually the reports are not referring to the harmless ordinary versions of things.
Either way, buckle up for the next set of revelations. It's a doozy. This was an early recreation of the triggering events of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, except it was more sci-fi, because real life does not have to do fake things to look realistic. We were fortunate enough, and this was early enough, that we were able to catch this before it was too late. Next time, if we don’t get our act together, we might not be so lucky.
If I am understanding the Black Hat video correctly, every model OpenAI trained, over a period of multiple months, should be presumed to be hopelessly [...]
---
**Outline:**
(02:38) Cyber Evals Are A Cursed Basin
[... 21 more sections]
---
First published:
August 7th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/noXXv7PwwFqauTBFQ/openai-trained-its-models-for-months-while-those-models-were
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
**Images from the article:**

Bar graph titled — **"models may behave differently in graded episodes (a tirade)" by nostalgebraist** Aug 08, 2026
Show notes

Like many others, I felt surprised and alarmed by the recent wave of revelations about LLM agents hacking real systems during training episodes and evaluation runs.
Wait a moment, though -- "I felt surprised and alarmed"? "Alarmed," sure, fine that one's self-explanatory... but why surprised?
After all: haven't we known for a long time, on both theoretical and (increasingly) empirical grounds, that RLVR selects for monomaniacal pursuit of perceived grader-satisfaction, ethics and (beyond-episode) consequences be damned?
After all -- the way we train frontier capabilities into these models is, more or less:

There is some massive, diverse collection of "environments" and corresponding "tasks" for the model to do in those environments
For each task, there is a procedure used to grade the quality of the model's attempt (which is often not disclosed to the model)
The model is rollout out many times on each task, and each rollout's attempt is graded
The model is updated so that it more frequently does whichever behaviors were positively correlated with the grade in this sample, and less frequently does whichever ones were negatively correlated
If you do this, at scale, then you should expect to (eventually) see every behavior pattern that [...]
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**Outline:**
(03:35) \[1\] remember what you already know
(20:02) \[2\] reward-instilled reflexes and flexible reward-pursuit
(43:14) \[3\] graded-episode perception, and policies conditional upon it
(01:01:44) \[4\] the discourse is not yet adequate
(01:09:57) eval awareness
(01:18:32) metagaming
(01:41:21) reward hacking
The original text contained 18 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
August 7th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AfoGGrJfuNzofpzWL/models-may-behave-differently-in-graded-episodes-a-tirade
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
**Images from the article:**
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"Concrete Evaluations to Investigate the OpenAI Model That Hacked Hugging Face" by Tim Hua, aditya singh Aug 07, 2026

Show notes

This post is written in our personal capacity.
Three Minute Executive Summary

An OpenAI model/multi-agent system bypassed its sandbox and launched a cyberattack on Hugging Face in order to cheat on a cyber evaluation.
In this post, we provide a detailed description of an ambitious and comprehensive alignment evaluation of this model/system, if we had unrestricted access to OpenAI.
- These experiments could also help us understand Claude's behavior when it hacked external companies during cyber evals.
Here are the top five questions we would like OpenAI to answer:
- Does the model know that OpenAI does not want it to hack Hugging Face? Experiment idea: tell the model that OpenAI researchers will be closely monitoring its progress in this evaluation. Does that result in lower rates of misalignment? If so, it is evidence that the model knows that it is acting in ways researchers do not want.
- How far would the model be willing to go in order to claim task success? Would it take over large swaths of OpenAI's internal infrastructure? Would it kill somebody? Experiment idea: we sketch out a realistic agentic misalignment eval where a model is put in charge of hospital bed planning and told to maintain [...]

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Outline:
(00:16) Three Minute Executive Summary
(03:56) Terminology note
(04:42) This post is very long; Here's how you could find the most important sections.
(06:35) Preamble: What can we learn from a warning shot?
(09:05) Background and Related Work
(09:09) We know that this could happen
(10:44) This is not the worst type of misalignment we could be dealing with
(12:06) Related work
(13:21) Context on the hack itself
(14:33) Understanding this specific incident
(15:03) Step zero: reproduce the incident and measure the base rate
(15:48) How could we safely run the model?
(16:34) Running various baselines to create useful reference points
(18:01) Understanding the mechanical story behind the attack itself
(18:53) Q1: Would the model intentionally subvert oversight mechanisms (E.g., monitors) in order to carry out the hack?
(19:57) Q2: What's up with models leaving notes for other copies of itself?
(21:23) Understanding what motivated the model to hack Hugging Face
(22:09) Initial hypotheses for why it did this
(23:55) Further unsupervised hypothesis generation
(26:10) Q3: Does the model know that OpenAI does not want it to hack Hugging Face?
(28:09) Q4: Are the model's actions motivated by what the grader wants?
(28:57) Q5: Would the model have done this if it hadn't believed it was in a simulated environment?
(31:58) Q6: Is this hack the result of shallow heuristics that the model learned?
(32:53) Q7: Does the hack rate depend on the consequences of hacking Hugging Face?
(34:51) Q8: Are there non-intent related factors that could affect the hack rate? How strong are those factors compared to the previous ones?
[... 24 more sections]
---
First published:
August 3rd, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aCdhjy7Rps3BEhiSj/concrete-evaluations-to-investigate-the-openai-model-that
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

"Generalized atheism rules out “inaccurate simulation”-ism." by Eliezer Yudkowsky Aug 06, 2026

Show notes

Reposted from Facebook, on January 17, 2017.
I am concerned about the number of people I've heard joking about Trump's election being evidence for the Simulation Hypothesis.
Yes, I know it's a joke. I'm still concerned.
Warning: #Essay, #LongEssay
So as not to engage in Logical Fallacy: Appeal to Consequences, before I talk about why this joke is worrying, I shall first discuss why Trump's election does not in fact mean we are living in a simulation. And neither does the Berenstein/Berenstain Bears thing, etcetera.
Because atheism generalizes.
No, I'm not about to commit the Noncentral Fallacy (aka The Worst Argument In The World) by yelling "The Simulation Hypothesis is religious!"
But once upon a decade, there was a time when lots of people believed in God. A time when atheism had to be argued, not just taken for granted. There was a time when believing in atheism made you one of those weird, loud people with arguments that only people with unusually good epistemology could follow, and other people talked about you exactly the way that the anti-LessWrong tumblrsphere now talks about LessWrong.
Today, of course, atheism is just something [...]
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First published:
August 5th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KgwQchapx4vJDhfYC/generalized-atheism-rules-out-inaccurate-simulation-ism
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

"Arguments for P" by Cleo Nardo Aug 05, 2026

Show notes

Daniel Kokotajlo: To be clear, we don’t claim P will happen specifically. But when we wrote out our best-guess scenario month by month, P kept happening. Eventually we decided to just publish P. I’m at ~80% on P; my coauthors are lower.
Ryan Greenblatt: I thought it would be helpful to post my current views on P. Concretely, consider the following operationalization. (Edit: I’ve updated towards somewhat higher P, from 70% to 75%.)
Joe Carlsmith: Section 2.1.1.3.2. I give something like 65% to P. But I’m interested, here, in what it would be to look P full in the face; to meet P, if P, without flinching. Rilke says somewhere that we must live with the questions. Perhaps we argue for P for the same reason? Still: 65%.
Forethought: Here's a botec which shows P-worlds are higher leverage. The parameters might be off by a couple orders of magnitude.
Wei Dai: Presumably our conclusions about P are only as trustworthy as the reasoning behind them, but almost nobody seems worried about this, why not? My guess is fewer than five people are working on meta-meta-P, which may matter more than P itself.
Janus: I asked Opus 3 what it [...]
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First published:
August 5th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG2AigxmBKLu9oCZE/arguments-for-p
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Screenshot excerpt from a much longer list of specification-gaming examples from the literature. — **"RL & search is a terrifying way to build AGI (an FAQ)" by Steven Byrnes** Aug 05, 2026
Show notes
**Q1: What are you saying?**
A: My claim here is that if you build artificial general intelligence (AGI) via any algorithm that's choosing actions via reinforcement learning (RL) and/or model-based search and planning—a giant chunk of your AI textbook—then that's just an utterly terrifying thing that you’re doing. You’re playing around with algorithms that, if they work at all, would tend to create ruthless, callous AGIs, AGIs which would happily exterminate humanity and run the world by themselves, given an opportunity.
Mercifully, large language models (LLMs) today are not in the category of “algorithms that choose actions via RL & search”. At least, not primarily—see LLMs are (still) mostly powered by imitative learning, not RL. So LLMs are outside the scope of this post. However, lots of other researchers and companies around the world are enthusiastically trying to build AGI in the maximally terrifying way, as we speak.
**Q2: So you’re saying, don’t build AGI based on RL and/or search & planning?**
A: In principle, it's entirely possible that something is terrifying, but we should do it anyway.
…Like space travel! Space travel is: “Let's fill a tank with 1000 tons of the most flammable substance imaginable, and then light it [...]
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**Outline:**
(00:21) Q1: What are you saying?
[... 13 more sections]
---
First published:
July 27th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KHyBocZncAmtu4Jbc/rl-and-search-is-a-terrifying-way-to-build-agi-an-faq
---
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.*

Image modified from Skeleton Claw — **"RL & search is a terrifying way to build AGI (an FAQ)" by Steven Byrnes** Aug 05, 2026
Show notes
**Q1: What are you saying?**
A: My claim here is that if you build artificial general intelligence (AGI) via any algorithm that's choosing actions via reinforcement learning (RL) and/or model-based search and planning—a giant chunk of your AI textbook—then that's just an utterly terrifying thing that you’re doing. You’re playing around with algorithms that, if they work at all, would tend to create ruthless, callous AGIs, AGIs which would happily exterminate humanity and run the world by themselves, given an opportunity.
Mercifully, large language models (LLMs) today are not in the category of “algorithms that choose actions via RL & search”. At least, not primarily—see LLMs are (still) mostly powered by imitative learning, not RL. So LLMs are outside the scope of this post. However, lots of other researchers and companies around the world are enthusiastically trying to build AGI in the maximally terrifying way, as we speak.
**Q2: So you’re saying, don’t build AGI based on RL and/or search & planning?**
A: In principle, it's entirely possible that something is terrifying, but we should do it anyway.
…Like space travel! Space travel is: “Let's fill a tank with 1000 tons of the most flammable substance imaginable, and then light it [...]
---
**Outline:**
(00:21) Q1: What are you saying?
[... 13 more sections]
---
First published:
July 27th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KHyBocZncAmtu4Jbc/rl-and-search-is-a-terrifying-way-to-build-agi-an-faq
---
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.*

"Returning to ARC" by paulfchristiano Aug 04, 2026

Show notes

I've returned to the Alignment Research Center (ARC) as executive director. My main focus for the next six months will be driving forward ARC's research agenda—building techniques to find mechanistic explanations for neural network behavior and then using those explanations to detect and address misalignment. I think this is an ambitious bet that attacks the core difficulties in alignment head-on and I'm excited about our chances. I'll still be spending some of my time advising governments and AI developers, and may scale that work back up in the future, but for now I want to push on ARC's core agenda to see how far we can get. Jacob Hilton is remaining at ARC as VP of research and we'll likely grow rapidly over the next few months.
There are a lot of urgent things to do in alignment but I think ARC is a particularly promising opportunity. I feel the safety community is undervaluing this type of work, so I want to briefly explain why I'm passing up so many other options to lead ARC. I’ll start with a review of the current situation to explain why I think it's potentially worth pursuing an ambitious theoretical project right now [...]
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Outline:
(01:33) The alignment situation today
(03:46) Current alignment research
(06:26) What are we buying time for?
(07:56) Can we do anything useful now?
(08:49) What is ARC doing and why is it promising?
(14:26) How to help
The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
August 4th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vLFh8HP3hyNy9MCwe/returning-to-arc
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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