Podcast Episodes
Back to Search"In My Misanthropy Era" by jenn
For the past year I've been sinking into the Great Books via the Penguin Great Ideas series, because I wanted to be conversant in the Great Conversa…
3 months, 1 week ago
"2025 in AI predictions" by jessicata
Past years: 2023 2024
Continuing a yearly tradition, I evaluate AI predictions from past years, and collect a convenience sample of AI predictions m…
3 months, 1 week ago
"Good if make prior after data instead of before" by dynomight
They say you’re supposed to choose your prior in advance. That's why it's called a “prior”. First, you’re supposed to say say how plausible differen…
3 months, 2 weeks ago
"Measuring no CoT math time horizon (single forward pass)" by ryan_greenblatt
A key risk factor for scheming (and misalignment more generally) is opaque reasoning ability.One proxy for this is how good AIs are at solving math …
3 months, 2 weeks ago
"Recent LLMs can use filler tokens or problem repeats to improve (no-CoT) math performance" by ryan_greenblatt
Prior results have shown that LLMs released before 2024 can't leverage 'filler tokens'—unrelated tokens prior to the model's final answer—to perform…
3 months, 3 weeks ago
"Turning 20 in the probable pre-apocalypse" by Parv Mahajan
Master version of this on https://parvmahajan.com/2025/12/21/turning-20.html
I turn 20 in January, and the world looks very strange. Probably, thin…
3 months, 3 weeks ago
"Alignment Pretraining: AI Discourse Causes Self-Fulfilling (Mis)alignment" by Cam, Puria Radmard, Kyle O’Brien, David Africa, Samuel Ratnam, andyk
TL;DR
LLMs pretrained on data about misaligned AIs themselves become less aligned. Luckily, pretraining LLMs with synthetic data about good AIs help…
3 months, 3 weeks ago
"Dancing in a World of Horseradish" by lsusr
Commercial airplane tickets are divided up into coach, business class, and first class. In 2014, Etihad introduced The Residence, a premium experien…
3 months, 3 weeks ago
"Contradict my take on OpenPhil’s past AI beliefs" by Eliezer Yudkowsky
At many points now, I've been asked in private for a critique of EA / EA's history / EA's impact and I have ad-libbed statements that I feel guilty …
3 months, 3 weeks ago
"Opinionated Takes on Meetups Organizing" by jenn
Screwtape, as the global ACX meetups czar, has to be reasonable and responsible in his advice giving for running meetups.
And the advice is great! I…
3 months, 3 weeks ago