LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Epistemic status: Feeling frustrated, and therefore somewhat uncharitable.

I’m very frustrated with calls for people to “drop everything and pivot into AI safety” like this one. (See also this, this, this, this for recent calls for more people to go into AI safety; though my frustration was triggered by the Celeste's post.)

There are far more talented people trying to get into AI safety than there are jobs for them. MLAB 2, which I did in 2022, was already competitive to get into, at about 5% acceptance rate (admitted about 40 out of 800 applicants). Things are much, much more competitive now. There is a whole pipeline of AI safety fellowships (and guides for applying to them). It is rumored that one recent cohort of the Anthropic Fellows program had over 10,000 applicants. (Anecdotally, I applied to the Anthropic Fellows program in early 2026, after working at Redwood, METR, and an ML startup, and I didn’t get in!)

And, uh, just take a look at the AI safety jobs? The bottom of the salary range for METR's current “Member of Technical Staff, Embedded Assessments” job posting is 402 thousand dollars. This is higher than the median total comp for [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

October 9th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xLgJJC3CD3y3AhtKn/stop-telling-people-to-pivot-to-ai-safety-i-beg-you

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Lots of the discussion around Lean certificates and trust centers around general philosophical ideas of how much humans should trust formal certificates. It's important to remember, though, that Lean4 is not an ideal formal certificate machine: Lean4 is a software in its infancy and has issues. There are reasonable reasons to specifically not trust Lean4.

If we're going to be putting our society's trust in Lean4, I think that it's good to have an open critical discussion of how warranted that trust is.

Epistemic status: Most of this work is a factual description about aspects of Lean4 and set theory. I am 85% sure that at most two of these factual descriptions are incorrect. I am 90% sure that, in the current version of Lean4 on Github, there exists a proof of the statement "True=False" that would be accepted with two little blue checkmarks (either by messing with the elaborator, compiler, kernel, or some other part of the Lean). I am 2% certain that we will soon be putting huge amounts of trust into Lean4 certificates produced by misaligned AIs, and that the human work we do as a community thinking about and fixing Lean4 in the next 24 [...]

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Outline:

(01:23) The current status of things

[... 8 more sections]

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First published:

October 9th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zHhGa3iQBQcdSifFL/a-critical-look-at-lean4-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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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 reshapes society, but not that it could leap us to the end of the tech tree shortly afterwards and start making nanotech and dyson spheres.

Hence, you see people saying things like “Because of AI we must rethink the entire notion of mathematical progress”, or “I have to make sure I amass lots of capital before most jobs get automated”: pretty crazy statements, and yet, still not quite grappling with how wild things could get in the next few years, let alone the next decade.

I feel a particular frustration here as someone who is both pretty ASI-pilled and pretty into liberal democracy. And when I say liberal democracy I don’t so much mean the specific political structure that seems efficient at our current tech level but rather the set of underlying moral commitments like non-domination and a government of the people — commitments which I’m aware might soon be a lot more expensive.

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The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

October 8th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eSMburFT9eRxHWijf/asi-and-liberty-can-we-do-better-than-a-benevolent-god

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A summary of a Chinese essay, with a few short translated excerpts. All views below are the author's; quotes are my translations.

On 14 September 2026, a DeepSeek engineer writing as intlsy published a WeChat essay titled 我不得不把才华埋葬在昨天 ("I have to bury my talent in yesterday"). He wrote the main attention kernel of DeepSeek v4.1 (the head-dim-512 MQA attention). The essay is a personal reflection on AI taking over his specialty, and it ends with an argument for open-weight frontier AI.

The essay went viral in Chinese Internet: WeChat shows it at "100k+" reads (the platform's display cap), with about 41,000 likes, 84,000 shares, 31,000 recommendations and 1,601 comments as of 7 October 2026. It is probably one of the most widely shared Chinese-language article of what AI automation looks like from inside a frontier lab, and thus a sample of what a large Chinese technical audience is reading and reacting to.

I think it might interest Lesswrong readers.

His argument

1. AI is catching up in his own specialty

He describes AI going very fast, from only an assistant that looked up documentation and found bugs to a system that can read CUDA, PTX and SASS, profile the [...]

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Outline:

(01:22) His argument

(01:25) 1. AI is catching up in his own specialty

(02:08) 2. Why he keeps speeding up his own replacement

(02:48) 3. Not out of work, but forced to change what the work is

(03:32) 4. Worries about everyone else

(04:12) 5. Two futures, and his case for open AI

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First published:

October 8th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/o8roRrdisBAjngHJN/a-summary-of-a-viral-chinese-essay-on-what-a-deepseek-kernel

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Epistemic status: I wrote this up hoping people can poke holes in it because I am quite worried.

Here's what we've heard so far:

Local media is reporting that an employee of a BSL-3 lab in Irkutsk, Russia, died of pneumonic plague on Oct 1st.
The initial quarantine covered 200 people who were in contact with the employee before she died.
The FSB (Russian FBI) was seen assisting in the quarantine, which means it was not voluntary.
Soviet-era whistleblowers like Ken Alibek claim Irkutsk was a major bioweapon development facility.

As of Oct 4th:

The quarantine has expanded to 5 hospitals in the area.
The Russian government has switched to denial/coverup. Local news sources have deleted mentions of "pneumonic plague."
Local universities and schools have canceled some classes and extended mask mandates.
On the lab's website, they mention gain-of-function research for making bacteria more virulent.
The White House is monitoring the suspected outbreak.
Why this might be a big deal

Regular pneumonic plague is maybe not that hard to deal with (?) but if it is a bioweapon that was leaked, it could be significantly more virulent than, say [...]
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Outline:

(00:18) Here's what we've heard so far:

(00:52) As of Oct 4th:

(02:06) Why this might be a big deal

(03:29) Why this might not be a big deal

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First published:

October 5th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TYfpTRxGH9frTymwN/how-much-should-we-worry-about-the-pneumonic-plague-lableak

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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