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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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

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© 2026 LessWrong (Curated & Popular) Philosophy Social Sciences
Episodes
  • "Dario Amodei – The Adolescence of Technology" by habryka

    "Dario Amodei – The Adolescence of Technology" by habryka
    Jan 28 2026
    Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has written a new essay on his thoughts on AI risk of various shapes. It seems worth reading, even if just for understanding what Anthropic is likely to do in the future.

    Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI

    There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan's book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity's representative to meet the aliens. The international panel interviewing her asks, “If you could ask [the aliens] just one question, what would it be?” Her reply is: “I’d ask them, ‘How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?” When I think about where humanity is now with AI—about what we’re on the cusp of—my mind keeps going back to that scene, because the question is so apt for our current situation, and I wish we had the aliens’ answer to guide us. I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity [...]

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    Outline:

    (00:24) Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI

    (15:19) 1. I'm sorry, Dave

    (15:23) Autonomy risks

    (28:53) Defenses

    (41:17) 2. A surprising and terrible empowerment

    (41:22) Misuse for destruction

    (54:50) Defenses

    (01:00:25) 3. The odious apparatus

    (01:00:30) Misuse for seizing power

    (01:13:08) Defenses

    (01:19:48) 4. Player piano

    (01:19:51) Economic disruption

    (01:21:18) Labor market disruption

    (01:33:43) Defenses

    (01:37:43) Economic concentration of power

    (01:40:49) Defenses

    (01:43:13) 5. Black seas of infinity

    (01:43:17) Indirect effects

    (01:47:29) Humanity's test

    (01:53:58) Footnotes

    The original text contained 92 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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    First published:
    January 26th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kzPQohJakutbtFPcf/dario-amodei-the-adolescence-of-technology

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    1 hr and 54 mins
  • "AlgZoo: uninterpreted models with fewer than 1,500 parameters" by Jacob_Hilton

    "AlgZoo: uninterpreted models with fewer than 1,500 parameters" by Jacob_Hilton
    Jan 27 2026
    Audio note: this article contains 78 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.

    This post covers work done by several researchers at, visitors to and collaborators of ARC, including Zihao Chen, George Robinson, David Matolcsi, Jacob Stavrianos, Jiawei Li and Michael Sklar. Thanks to Aryan Bhatt, Gabriel Wu, Jiawei Li, Lee Sharkey, Victor Lecomte and Zihao Chen for comments.

    In the wake of recent debate about pragmatic versus ambitious visions for mechanistic interpretability, ARC is sharing some models we've been studying that, in spite of their tiny size, serve as challenging test cases for any ambitious interpretability vision. The models are RNNs and transformers trained to perform algorithmic tasks, and range in size from 8 to 1,408 parameters. The largest model that we believe we more-or-less fully understand has 32 parameters; the next largest model that we have put substantial effort into, but have failed to fully understand, has 432 parameters. The models are available at the AlgZoo GitHub repo.

    We think that the "ambitious" side of the mechanistic interpretability community has historically underinvested in "fully understanding slightly complex [...]

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    Outline:

    (03:09) Mechanistic estimates as explanations

    (06:16) Case study: 2nd argmax RNNs

    (08:30) Hidden size 2, sequence length 2

    (14:47) Hidden size 4, sequence length 3

    (16:13) Hidden size 16, sequence length 10

    (19:52) Conclusion

    The original text contained 20 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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    First published:
    January 26th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x8BbjZqooS4LFXS8Z/algzoo-uninterpreted-models-with-fewer-than-1-500-parameters

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    22 mins
  • "Does Pentagon Pizza Theory Work?" by rba

    "Does Pentagon Pizza Theory Work?" by rba
    Jan 27 2026
    As soon as modern data analysis became a thing, the US government has had to deal with people trying to use open source data to uncover its secrets.

    During the early Cold War days and America's hydrogen bomb testing, there was an enormous amount of speculation about how the bombs actually worked. All nuclear technology involves refinement and purification of large amounts of raw substances into chemically pure substances. Armen Alchian was an economist working at RAND and reasoned that any US company working in such raw materials and supplying the government would have made a killing leading up to the tests.

    After checking financial data that RAND maintained on such companies, Alchian deduced that the secret sauce in the early fusion bombs was lithium and the Lithium Corporation of America was supplying the USG. The company's stock had skyrocketed leading up to the Castle Bravo test either by way of enormous unexpected revenue gains from government contracts, or more amusingly, maybe by government insiders buying up the stock trying to make a mushroom-cloud-sized fortune with the knowledge that lithium was the key ingredient.

    When word of this work got out, this story naturally ends with the FBI coming [...]

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    Outline:

    (01:27) Pizza is the new lithium

    (03:09) The Data

    (04:11) The Backtest

    (04:36) Fordow bombing

    (04:55) Maduro capture

    (05:15) The Houthi stuff

    (10:25) Coda

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    First published:
    January 22nd, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Li3Aw7sDLXTCcQHZM/does-pentagon-pizza-theory-work

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    11 mins
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