193 stories
The US has about 150 million workers. How long did it take them to learn to do what they do? I'm interested in this because of the analogous question for AI. Running an AI on a job and training it to do the job are different costs.
TL;DR: We identify a confound in no-cot-bench related to the positioning of the prompt's "key." Correcting for this decreases GPT-6.1 Sol's no-cot reasoning depth by 16%, with the effect likely growing as dependent depth increases.
Preseen is partnering with the University of Chicago's Knowledge Lab to work on forecasting scientific and technological progress.We wrote up what we're building and some of the underlying research problems here.Discuss
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.
This is joint work with Sahar Abdelnabi and David Krueger. It is mostly a linkpost for the paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36316) but also contains some additional commentary on CoT monitorability.TL;DR: Verbalization training makes a model less reticent about verbalizing a belief it already…
According to Atomic Habits, changing your identity is the highest leverage way to improve your habits, but nobody tells you how to do it.Don’t say “I’m trying to quit smoking.” Say “I’m not a smoker”. Don’t say “I’m trying to lose weight.” Say “I’m a health nut.”All well and good.
Berkeley's Winter Solstice will be on December 12th at the Freight; more details coming soon!Discuss
Adapted from my Substack. This is the first installment of a series operationalizing the resilience program from AI as Normal Technology.Epistemic status: Confident in the core thesis, less certain of its broader significance.
I don’t know if it occurred to me until my thirties to think of exercise as an enjoyable thing. I was familiar with finding obscure corner-cases that were fun, such as Dance Dance Revolution.
[Epistemic status: intuitions and anecdotes.]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.
Book review: Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us? and How to Stop It, by Garrison Lovely.Obsolete is a strange book. It’s mostly good, but the quality varies a good deal. Lovely is well informed about concerns that AI might kill us all, and doesn’t dispute those concerns.
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 have recently completed MATS 10.0, where I worked alongside Bart Jaworski under Victoria Krakovna (GDM). This is a post I was encouraged to make by my team at Geodesic Research from some slides I put together. This is not a post on application advice to MATS, or about the program in general.
My post on endogenous alignment got several excellent comments. Among them, one from Karl Krueger argued that imitation learning is more important for how humans align their children than reinforcement learning.
This year it's up to $65M. Historically the funder has usually just been Jaan; this year Dustin was also a funder.I'm happy about these grants. I'm grateful to SFC, the speculators & evaluators, and especially Jaan + Dustin for making these grants happen.Discuss
Note: I'm not a WWII history buff, so if there's any significant misinterpretation of relevant history here, I welcome corrections in the comments.In December 1944, Joseph Rotblat, a physicist working on the Manhattan project, resigned.
This post summarises our paper Learning Steganography Is Easy, Learning Steganographic Reasoning Is Hard, accepted as an oral at the NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Trustworthy AI for Good (AI4GOOD).
Is Google back? They claim that they are back. Gemini 4 Argon is rolling out, with competitive frontier-level benchmarks, at $2/$10. What we don’t have is access to the model, because Google Fails Marketing Forever. So it is far too early to say what we have here. When I know more, so will you.
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