LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Or, for that matter, anything else.

This post is meant to be two things:

a PSA about LessWrong's current security posture, from a LessWrong admin[1]
an attempt to establish common knowledge of the security situation it looks like the world (and, by extension, you) will shortly be in
Claude Mythos was announced yesterday. That announcement came with a blog post from Anthropic's Frontier Red Team, detailing the large number of zero-days (and other security vulnerabilities) discovered by Mythos.

This should not be a surprise if you were paying attention - LLMs being trained on coding first was a big hint, the labs putting cybersecurity as a top-level item in their threat models and evals was another, and frankly this blog post maybe could've been written a couple months ago (either this or this might've been sufficient). But it seems quite overdetermined now.

LessWrong's security posture

In the past, I have tried to communicate that LessWrong should not be treated as a platform with a hardened security posture. LessWrong is run by a small team. Our operational philosophy is similar to that of many early-stage startups. We treat some LessWrong data as private in a social sense, but do [...]

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Outline:

(01:04) LessWrongs security posture

(02:03) LessWrong is not a high-value target

(04:11) FAQ

(04:29) The Broader Situation

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

April 8th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2wi5mCLSkZo2ky32p/do-not-be-surprised-if-lesswrong-gets-hacked

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

In this post, I'll go through some of my best guesses for the current situation in AI as of the start of April 2026.
You can think of this as a scenario forecast, but for the present (which is already uncertain!) rather than the future.
I will generally state my best guess without argumentation and without explaining my level of confidence: some of these claims are highly speculative while others are better grounded, certainly some will be wrong.
I tried to make it clear which claims are relatively speculative by saying something like "I guess", "I expect", etc. (but I may have missed some).

You can think of this post as more like a list of my current views rather than a structured post with a thesis, but I think it may be informative nonetheless.

In a future post, I'll go beyond the present and talk about my predictions for the future.

(I was originally working on writing up some predictions, but the "predictions" about today ended up being extensive enough that a separate post seemed warranted.)

AI R&D acceleration (and software acceleration more generally)

Right now, AI companies are heavily integrating and deploying [...]

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Outline:

(01:07) AI R&D acceleration (and software acceleration more generally)

(05:28) AI engineering capabilities and qualitative abilities

(10:38) Misalignment and misalignment-related properties

(15:59) Cyber

(18:07) Bioweapons

(18:52) Economic effects

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

April 7th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WjaGAA4xCAXeFpyWm/my-picture-of-the-present-in-ai

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

epistemic status: confident in the overall picture, substantial quantitative uncertainty about the relative potency of caffeine and paraxanthine

tldr: The effects of caffeine consumption last longer than many assume. Paraxanthine is sort of like caffeine that behaves the way many mistakenly believe caffeine behaves.




You've probably heard that caffeine exerts its psychostimulatory effects by blocking adenosine receptors. That matches my understanding, having dug into this. I'd also guess that, insofar as you've thought about the duration of caffeine's effects, you've thought of them as decaying with a ~5 hour half-life. I used to think this, and every effect duration calculator I've seen assumes it (even this fancy one based on a complicated model that includes circadian effects). But this part is probably wrong.

Very little circulating caffeine is directly excreted.[1] Instead, it's converted (metabolized) into other similar molecules (primary metabolites), which themselves undergo further steps of metabolism (into secondary, tertiary, etc. metabolites) before reaching a form where they're efficiently excreted.

Importantly, the primary metabolites also block adenosine receptors. In particular, more than 80% of circulating caffeine is metabolized into paraxanthine, which has a comparable[2] binding affinity at adenosine receptors to caffeine itself. Paraxanthine then has its own [...]

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Outline:

(02:43) Paraxanthine supplements

(05:13) Exactly how potent is paraxanthine compared to caffeine?

(08:41) Concluding thoughts

The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

April 8th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vefsxkGWkEMmDcZ7v/the-effects-of-caffeine-consumption-do-not-decay-with-a-5

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I've recently updated towards substantially shorter AI timelines and much faster progress in some areas.
[1]
The largest updates I've made are (1) an almost 2x higher probability of full AI R&D automation by EOY 2028 (I'm now a bit below 30%
[2]
while I was previously expecting around 15%; my guesses are pretty reflectively unstable) and (2) I expect much stronger short-term performance on massive and pretty difficult but easy-and-cheap-to-verify software engineering (SWE) tasks that don't require that much novel ideation
[3]
. For instance, I expect that by EOY 2026, AIs will have a 50%-reliability
[4]
time horizon of years to decades on reasonably difficult easy-and-cheap-to-verify SWE tasks that don't require much ideation (while the high reliability—for instance, 90%—time horizon will be much lower, more like hours or days than months, though this will be very sensitive to the task distribution). In this post, I'll explain why I've made these updates, what I now expect, and implications of this update.

I'll refer to "Easy-and-cheap-to-verify SWE tasks" as ES tasks and to "ES tasks that don't require much ideation (as in, don't require 'new' ideas)" as ESNI tasks for brevity.

Here are the main drivers of [...]

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Outline:

(04:58) Whats going on with these easy-and-cheap-to-verify tasks?

(08:17) Some evidence against shorter timelines Ive gotten in the same period

(10:46) Why does high performance on ESNI tasks shorten my timelines?

(13:15) How much does extremely high performance on ESNI tasks help with AI R&D?

(18:22) My experience trying to automate safety research with current models

(19:58) My experience seeing if my setup can automate massive ES tasks

(21:08) SWE tasks

(23:29) AI R&D task

(24:20) Cyber

[... 1 more section]

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First published:

April 6th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dKpC6wHFqDrGZwnah/ais-can-now-often-do-massive-easy-to-verify-swe-tasks-and-i

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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The second time Vellam uncovers the conspiracy underlying all of society, he approaches a Keeper.

Some of the difference is convenience. Since Vellam reported that he’d found out about the first conspiracy, he's lived in the secret AI research laboratory at the Basement of the World, and Keepers are much easier to come by than when he was a quality control inspector for cheese.

But Vellam is honest with himself. If he were making progress, he’d never tell the Keepers no matter how convenient they were, not even if they lined his front walkway every morning to beg him for a scrap of his current intellectual project. He’d sat on his insight about artificial general intelligence for two years before he decided that he preferred isolation to another day of cheese inspection.

No, the only reason he's telling a Keeper is that he's stuck.

Vellam is exactly as smart as the average human, a fact he has almost stopped feeling bad about. But the average person can only work twenty hours a week, and Vellam can work eighty-- a hundred, if he's particularly interested-- and raw thinkoomph can be compensated for with bloody-mindedness. Once he's found a loose end [...]

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First published:

April 4th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fvm4AzLnoZHqNEBqf/dark-ilan

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.