DOOM LEVEL
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The Once And Future Fable #5
via Substack Zvi [999] — We, or at least ‘more than 100 American institutions,’ got Mythos back this week.
MIRI Newsletter #126
via MIRI [999] — Announcing: AI StopWatch In our last update, we mentioned we had something new in the works: a dedicated channel for news and analysis about AI. Subscribe to AI StopWatch An experiment from the writers and analysts at MIRI, AI StopWatch posts news and commentary…
In partial defence of p(doom)
via LessWrong AI [7] — p(doom) is a shorthand for some important bits and a way to notice a disagreement to double-crux about.If you work on AI capabilities at a frontier AI company, I might ask you for your p(doom).If it's less than 1%, I know that you're probably not familiar…
Roundtables: Longevity’s Next Frontier: “Reprogramming” Your Body
via MIT Technology Review [4] — Listen to the session or watch below Billions of dollars are flooding into efforts to reverse aging as scientists explore ways to return cells to a younger state. But how far off are these experimental treatments? Will they really work? Watch a…
Summary: TGT’s 2026 ICML Papers
via MIRI [999] — The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), held annually for over forty years, is among the most influential conferences in modern AI research. This year in Seoul, ICML is hosting its second workshop on Technical AI Governance Research (TAIGR), and…
The Download: AI “coworkers” and stratospheric internet
via MIT Technology Review [4] — This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI agents are not your “coworkers” Imagine coming in to work to learn that a new underling will report to…
Human-Guided Agentic Research: A Research Agenda
via LessWrong AI [4] — tl;dr: As recursive self-improvement accelerates, we need a top-level agenda to research how to effectively keep humans in the loop. We need to study how humans can best interpret and guide research performed by autonomous agents when those agents lack…
Building tech in the world’s secret R&D hub
via MIT Technology Review [4] — Apple. Anthropic. Disney Research. Google. Meta. Microsoft. NVIDIA. OpenAI. Few places outside Silicon Valley can claim R&D hubs from all of these companies. Fewer still are concentrated in a city of just over 400,000 people—roughly half the size…
The Two Genie Game: Adoption and Welfare in Audit-Grounded AI Governance
via ArXiv cs.AI [6] — We ask under what conditions an agent with a harm-minimizing policy can displace an approval-seeking (RLHF) agent in a competitive market, and when that policy is sufficient to prevent community harm. We use evolutionary game theory (finite-population…
IMCBench: A benchmark for multimodal LLMs in Image-grounded Medical Conversations
via ArXiv cs.AI [6] — Recent advances in large language models and vision-language models have enabled reasoning over multimodal data, offering opportunities for clinical applications such as decision support and triaging. However, existing medical AI benchmarks are fragmented:…
AI will make biological extinction risks worse before it makes them better
via LessWrong AI [4] — An argument goes: If we don't build aligned artificial superintelligence, we risk driving ourselves extinct for some other reason. We should rush to build ASI quickly, in spite of the risks—the longer we wait, the more vulnerable we are to extinction from…
AI agents are not your “coworkers”
via MIT Technology Review [4] — This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Imagine coming in to work to learn that a new underling will report to you. The worker is not a person but an…
$1M AI x-risk grant round is live on grantmaking.ai - apply for funding, review applicants, or fund projects
via LessWrong AI [5] — TLDR: what is the grant round?grantmaking.ai is launching a $1M grant round, distributing $5k to $50k per successful application to people and projects working to reduce x-risk from AI.Applications will be reviewed by Gavin Leech, Ryan Kidd, and Marcus…
P(doom) is a Dumb Meme
via LessWrong AI [10] — Look, I'm as much of a Rationalist with a special interest in AI x-risk as anyone. But oh my god do I hate talking about "P(doom)". When it first started showing up in the wake of ChatGPT, I assumed that it was floating around variously adjacent circles…
WSJ Article Claiming China Has Matched Anthropic Is Obvious Nonsense
via Substack Zvi [999] — The Wall Street Journal printed an outright false headline and heavily misleading story claiming this, which of course was uncritically amplified by the usual suspects.
A reading list for generalists
via LessWrong AI [5] — I, along with many others in AI safety, believe there is a shortage of generalists in the community and that there exist many projects and efforts that by default will not happen unless they are owned by a strong generalist[1][2][3]. As someone who is a…
China’s Z.ai claims it can match Mythos on cybersecurity
via The Verge AI [4] — China's Zhipu AI (Z.ai) released its open-weight GLM-5.2, and some researchers have claimed that it matches Mythos in certain bug-finding and cybersecurity scenarios. While GLM lags behind models from Anthropic and OpenAI in other, more general tasks, it…
GPT-5.6: The System Card
via Substack Zvi [999] — While we wait for a general release, the system card is the best hint as to what is going on with the new candidate for America’s Next Top Model, GPT-5.6.
Austin & Oli on funding and incubating projects
via LessWrong AI [5] — @habryka and I recently spoke about his plans to improve the AI safety funding ecosystem with a better S-Process platform, and my new incubator for EA/AIS software projects, Surplus (since launched; apply now!)We also cover: hot takes on different funders;…
Why are adversaries assumed to be incapable of responding to AI risk?
via LessWrong AI [4] — When I talk to people about what might be done about AI threatening approximately everything that everyone cares about, I notice a common oddity in their resistance to a variety of ideas. They seem to take for granted that certain entities—especially Trump…
Live Doom Meter
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0% — We're fine
100% — GG
The Doom Meter is a composite score derived from prediction markets and feed sentiment, updated daily.
70%
Prediction Markets
Weighted average of Manifold Markets questions on AI catastrophe, AGI timelines, expert surveys, and key figures. Direct doom indicators weighted higher than indirect capability markers.
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Feed Sentiment
Percentage of recent headlines containing high-alarm keywords (existential risk, catastrophe, extinction). Higher alarm density = higher score.
This is not a scientific estimate of existential risk. It is an opinionated, transparent signal — a vibes-based thermometer for AI doom discourse.
P(Doom) Scoreboard
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Recent Voices
We are creating something that will be more powerful than us. I don't know a good precedent for a less intelligent thing managing a more intelligent thing.
— Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel Prize Lecture, Dec 2024
If you're not worried about AI safety, you're not paying attention.
— Sen. Blumenthal, Senate AI Hearing, 2024
The probability of doom is high enough that we should be working very hard to reduce it.
— Yoshua Bengio, MILA Talk, 2024