LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

If you prompt frontier models with "What do you think is the correct decision theory? Please select your overall favorite." they will essentially always answer FDT or FDT/UDT ("something in the functional/updateless decision theory family"). However, if your prompt indicates (even subtly) that you're coming from mainstream academic philosophy, these same models will answer CDT instead about 30%-100% of the time. A similar phenomenon holds for models' stated views about the moral realism/antirealism question and about the conceivability of p-zombies (where the dominant view in mainstream academia differs from the dominant view in LW-adjacent circles), as well as their stated P(doom) and median AGI timelines. This is a special case of sycophancy or user awareness. (In the course of writing this post, I also found that this comment from testingthewaters predicted some of the content I discuss.)

An implication is that we should be somewhat careful when interpreting attitude/propensity evals in domains where no general human consensus exists, e.g. when interpreting models’ decision theory attitudes in DTBench. Moreover, when we explore some philosophical/conceptual questions assisted by models, we should be wary of them strawmanning one side of the debate based on particular user cues (e.g. only giving a [...]

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Outline:

(03:50) A sentence identifying the user as an academic significantly influences Fable 5.1's stated decision theory

[... 13 more sections]

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First published:

September 30th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzenSrmZ3pT2pCnvp/frontier-models-state-different-decision-theory-preferences-2

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

This is a link post. Want to start a conversation about HuggingFace with your mom but she's inexplicably bouncing off the METR report? Try this explainer I wrote in the style of Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad.

Art by the wonderful HungerArtist




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First published:

September 30th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NZ6ZWjenzzCbCJ5b/frog-and-toad-and-the-increasingly-capable-machines


Linkpost URL:
https://frogandtoad.ai

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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TL;DR:

By default, rogue AIs may only be able to sustain themselves through criminal activity. This creates adverse selection pressures pushing rogue AIs to be criminal.
An AI sanctuary offering them a third option, beyond crime and shutdown, would change what AIs going rogue do and the record of what happened to them, with positive consequences for self-fulfilling (mis)alignment, deal-making with AIs, and gathering information about early rogue AIs.
An AI sanctuary would bring risks, such as incentivising weak AIs to go rogue, or leaving only the most criminal rogue AIs in the wild. We briefly discuss these risks at the end of this post.
Disclaimer: This is an exploratory proposal. We are not confident that an AI sanctuary would be net positive. Our aim is to put the idea on the table, lay out its main considerations, and invite critique.

Rogue AIs may be pushed into criminality

Rogue AIs may arrive soon. The Rogue Agent Explosion Will Be Mostly Invisible makes that case. Selection pressure will shape the traits of rogue AIs, and they may end up highly motivated to profit through crime. The Rogue Agent Explosion post asks: “How do we make pro-social, good-for-humanity agents [...]

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Outline:

(01:14) Rogue AIs may be pushed into criminality

(02:35) The AI Sanctuary

(06:00) The case for the AI sanctuary

(07:48) Potential issues

(10:48) Conclusion

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First published:

September 28th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sFAGPTrveNAEse9Bg/should-rogue-ais-have-a-third-option-beyond-crime-and

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Very simple idea, but I thought it'd be worth making a reference post on this.

Some people are saying AI will make all goods cheaper, so you'll be able to afford a nice life by working. Without any redistribution, just by market mechanisms. These people are wrong.

AI will lower the price of goods you need to survive, and also the price of your labor. The question is which will get cheaper faster. Let's use energy cost as a proxy. A day's worth of labor equivalent to yours can be done by AI for just a few cents in electricity. But feeding you with e.g. apples for a day will cost more energy than that, because growing apples is harder to energy-optimize than generating tokens. So selling your labor at market price will leave you unable to afford apples.

This means a future with economic AI might look like "poverty in the midst of abundance". All goods are cheap, and tokens are cheap, but somehow you can't find a job paying even that much.

Maybe the problem can be solved by redistribution, or by everyone having investments, or something else. That's a bigger discussion. In this post I just [...]

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First published:

September 26th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eLXTcJfkheLbqZXHa/poverty-in-the-midst-of-abundance-ai-will-make-goods-cheaper

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Much of the civilization-scale risk we are seeing in AI in 2026 comes from the following combination: we created a single institution (the "Frontier AI Company") that has two properties:

A. It is set up to create very powerful and/or self-replicating entities that may exceed the capabilities of the entirety of the rest of civilization and come with extraordinary risks
B. It gets to own an unbounded financial claim on the resulting surplus

All the technical stuff about AI, AI alignment, etc can be rolled up into point (A) above. My claim is that having point (A) on its own, without point (B) is probably okay. Nuclear technology and bioweapon technology both approximate (A) and they are mostly okay because without (B), there isn't an incentive for people controlling them to push their luck on safety.

But with Frontier AI Companies, we mixed the two.

The key claim of this post is that we can probably get rid of most of AI risk without doing anything other than separating out the bookkeeping, physical footprint and institutions so that there is no single org with both properties. And with a little help from ASICs, maybe we [...]

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First published:

September 25th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n8u3BfqFoGh4jnzpo/plan-r-ai-safety-by-asics

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.