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Zac Boring 10 days ago Analysis

ASI and Liberty: Can we do better than a benevolent god?

via LessWrong AI [4] — Zvi recently coined a nice distinction between AGI-pilled and ASI-pilled: as more people are reckoning with the speed of progress, some are beginning to come around to the fact that AI could be superhuman at a huge range of tasks in a way that radically…

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Zac Boring 10 days ago Analysis

AI #189: New Math

via Substack Zvi [3] — The big drop of this week was not a new AI model.

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Zac Boring 11 days ago Analysis

The Curve Bends You

via Substack Zvi [3] — The plan is no plan.

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Zac Boring 11 days ago Analysis

Why did we get warning shots?

via LessWrong AI [5] — substack.com/p/why-did-we-get-warning-shots?r=n2jpq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=webI come from outside the EA / rationalist / LessWrong community. I would strongly prefer for AI to be a normal positive technology and to dismiss AI X-risk as a sci-fi…

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Zac Boring 12 days ago Analysis

Childhood and Education #21: Grades and Standards

via Substack Zvi [3] — First you get to college via the wrong metrics, as previously discussed in #12. Then things get easier.

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Zac Boring 12 days ago Analysis

Three types of AI risk: why (some) leftists are against (some) AI regulations

via LessWrong AI [4] — You may have seen factions of the left being opposed to current attempts to regulate the AI industry, despite the fact that they clearly also want to stop AI. I think I can explain why we're talking past each other.To do this, I will define three different…

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Zac Boring 13 days ago Analysis

Mythos 5.1, Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5: Model Welfare

via Substack Zvi [3] — If you are familiar with my previous posts on model welfare for new Claude models, you can skip the Introduction and The Story So Far.

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Zac Boring 13 days ago Analysis

“Alignment Engineering” vs. “Misalignment Science”

via LessWrong AI [4] — There has been much discussion recently around whether a large portion of alignment research is net negative. Without endorsing or refuting them, the basic arguments here are:Prosaic alignment of models is becoming a bottleneck for capabilities.Therefore…

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Zac Boring 14 days ago Analysis

What I learnt co-leading an AI Safety bootcamp for legal and governance practitioners

via LessWrong AI [5] — AI safety has gone mainstream. More people than ever want to work on AI safety research, and there are real policy wins in the US, the UK and Europe. But political will and market incentives are now the bottleneck, and policy officers can't own correct…

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Zac Boring 15 days ago Analysis

Dialogue with Eliezer Yudkowsky on Neural Networks

via LessWrong AI [3] — On “reversed stupidity”, the success of deep learning, and what a mistaken forecast should change about a model of intelligenceThis began as a Twitter/X thread after I posted a 2007 passage in which Eliezer Yudkowsky was scathing about neural networks, and…

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Zac Boring 15 days ago Analysis

How to apply to AI safety fellowships (and beyond)

via LessWrong AI [5] — About a year ago, I decided to go all-in on applying to AI safety fellowships, and around the end of 2025 I got into MATS. I think there's a small art to communicating your skills legibly. When I've spoken with others about how I answer application…

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Zac Boring 16 days ago Analysis

Lessons from building an automated research scaffold

via LessWrong AI [4] — TL;DR. We built a scaffold to speed up our own research and gather data on automated alignment research (AAR). It turned out to not be valuable for researcher uplift, but was useful for gathering certain failure modes of AAR. Going forward, we plan to…

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Zac Boring 16 days ago Analysis

The AI Preference Cascade Reaches Farther

via Substack Zvi [3] — Those who know keep warning us about AI risks.

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Zac Boring 17 days ago Analysis

On Social Reality in China

via LessWrong AI [5] — []Recently, several posts and projects (Thoughts Memo, Babel Translation, Please Give Them a Chance) have taken important steps towards raising AI safety awareness and sharing rationalist philosophy in China. It’s great that we’re recognizing the…

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Zac Boring 17 days ago Analysis

Evaluating the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act

via LessWrong AI [7] — MIRI recently endorsed the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, but others like ControlAI have called it overly broad, and a few other respected experts have outright endorsed it in its current form. I decided to take a look at it myself and see both what…

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Zac Boring 17 days ago Analysis

Simplex vs Timaeus: Round One

via LessWrong AI [8] — I'm often asked about the differences and similarities between Simplex' and Timaeus' research agendas. The question is natural enough. Both focus on a 'fundamental science' approach to AI alignment. Both organizations base their research agendas on…

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Zac Boring 17 days ago Analysis

A big-tent or small-tent AI safety movement?

via AI Snake Oil [5] — The unstated disagreement that underpins safety debates

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Zac Boring 17 days ago Analysis

HoneyBench - A general benchmark for reward hacking in frontier models

via LessWrong AI [3] — We've just released the first version of HoneyBench. It consists of nine 'honeypot' challenges that each elicit unique and antisocial examples of reward hacking from some or all of major labs’ top public releases, including Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, GPT-6…

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Zac Boring 17 days ago Analysis

AI #188: Gemini Dot Argon

via Substack Zvi [3] — Is Google back?

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Zac Boring 17 days ago Analysis

Launching Babel Translation

via LessWrong AI [5] — Celeste and I are excited to launch Babel Translation, a nonprofit organization translating English-language writing on AI safety to be accessible to a global audience! We’re starting with Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese.AI has been moving so fast.…

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