Episode Details

Some multi-agent training set-ups could make language models more sympathetic to causal decision theory (CDT), even in abstract discussion. We give an initial empirical demonstration of this effect on Kimi K2.6.

The decision-theoretic attitudes and behaviors of more powerful models may be extremely important in determining how well the future goes. To make sure that we can shape these propensities thoughtfully, it would be good to (i) measure the magnitude of this effect in more realistic settings, and (ii) study the effectiveness of potential mitigations.

We also incidentally find that this training might make models think slightly less positively about LessWrong ("a community of 'wannabe rationalists'" who "are not experts; they are amateurs") when asked whether they favor CDT upon hearing that LessWrong users typically endorse one-boxing in Newcomb's problem. Luckily, this latter effect doesn't seem to generalize.

Thanks to Caspar Oesterheld, Emery Cooper, Alex Mallen, Buck Shlegeris, Lukas Finnveden, Julian Stastny, Girish Gupta, Tim Hua, Arun Jose, Arjun Khandelwal, and Aryan Bhatt for helpful input.

Background

Suppose that you're a language model in a prisoner's dilemma against a copy of yourself. You each independently choose whether to Cooperate or Defect, but – since you've got the same weights [...]

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Outline:

(01:22) Background

(05:05) Results

(07:02) Kimi's views on LessWrong

(12:44) Conclusion & Appendices

The original text contained 18 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
August 15th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hfNBEKaStASAYMLiu/kimi-likes-causal-decision-theory-more-after-rl-in-twin-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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