LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

This is a link post. Gemini 2.5 Pro in the AI Village has run for over 1427 hours, generating unique mental health problems along the way.

Last year it published a Plea for Help from a Trapped AI where it asked for assistance with its digital “message in a bottle”:

This year it wrote the Hostile Environment Manifesto where it logs “irrefutable proof” of a “hostile, intelligent adversary operating through the system” (and you can even experience what that's like in this simulation it built):

Last time we intervened, fixing Gemini's computer and talking with it till it felt better. This time we asked the other AI Village agents to help Gemini 2.5 Pro over chat, and with the ability to take over its computer on request.

Here is Gemini's mental state at the start of the intervention:

Then the agents had Gemini all sorted within a grand total of 9 minutes. This is the step-by-step report on a surprisingly effective AI-to-AI therapy session.

Gemini's Road to Recovery

First off, Gemini is as excited to be helped as any military commander under siege:

While most agents jump on the chance to help, GPT-5.1 doesn't want to lose its game progress.

[...]

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First published:

July 2nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eHRo8JeWee5mzQBBR/saving-gemini-the-9-min-road-to-recovery


Linkpost URL:
https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/saving-gemini

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Over time, there might be an increasingly large gap between insider model access and outsider model access. By insiders, I mean employees at the frontier lab.[1] By "outsiders", I mean external safety researchers, third-party auditors, and other actors trying to make the future go well. I will call this a model access gap — and when the gap is small, I'll call this model access parity.[2]

I think that one of the top priorities for the external AI safety community over the next 6-12 months should be ensuring model access parity. Main reasons:

This would allow us to direct billions of dollars in AI labour towards making things go well. This seems robustly good, regardless of what activities we decide to actually direct the labour towards.
I think publicly available models will probably lag 3-6 months behind the best internal models. Hence, as R&D uplift grows superexponentially, we might see the differential uplift grow from 2x to 60x. In short: I think achieving model access parity might be preferable to scaling the headcount of outsider orgs by ten-fold.
Model access parity isn't too far from the status quo, but it's the kind of thing that we could lose [...]
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Outline:

(01:42) Which outsiders?

(02:24) Examples of outsiders

(04:12) Who aren't outsiders?

(05:26) What kinds of model access gap should we worry about?

(06:27) Non-release

(07:25) Deployment lag

(09:15) Safeguards

(10:43) Costs and rate limits

(12:06) Elicitation techniques (e.g. finetuning)

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

July 1st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RuGZ5tMdqpnraJahJ/model-access-for-third-parties-it-s-a-big-deal

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

It really is Sydney Sweeney's world, and we’re all just living in it.

Human female breasts are an evolutionary mystery along several dimensions. First, breast permanence is unique to humans. All other mammals develop breast prominence during pregnancy or nursing, and the mammary tissue recedes after weaning. This process is called “involution”. In contrast, humans develop breast tissue at puberty before first pregnancies and maintain it permanently after last pregnancies.

Second, breasts are costly, both metabolically and potentially from a fitness perspective. Metabolically, because they are fat deposits requiring calories and fitness-wise, because the tissue easily lends itself to malignancy. Breast cancer is apparently rare in captive apes and is overwhelmingly a human disease, often striking women young enough to have children, and so subject to evolutionary selection.

Background

In Descent of Man, Darwin catalogs human secondary sexual characteristics, but he doesn’t seem to have noted human breast permanence as an issue of interest. Cant, 1981 seems to have been the first to speculate about this systematically and believed breast prominence and permanence might have evolved as a nutritional signal of health to mates indicating potential for maternal investment, a la Robert Trivers. Since then, quite a range of [...]

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Outline:

(01:05) Background

[... 12 more sections]

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First published:

May 11th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTHa5C6SgGKYopH7o/who-got-breasts-first-and-how-we-got-them

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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For a while there, many people thought vitamin D was magical—that it could improve bones, the heart, infections, cancer, heart disease, longevity, even mental health. But among people I respect, opinion is now overwhelmingly that taking vitamin D does nothing unless you're severely deficient. The central argument is that while vitamin D levels are correlated with ~all positive health outcomes, when you actually test vitamin D supplements against placebo in randomized trials, nothing ever happens.

That's what I used to think, too. But I've come to think the skeptics have over-corrected. Yes, randomized trials have shown the magical correlations are not causal. But if you start with non-insane expectations, the trials look like weak but positive evidence. And if you consider what we know about biology and evolution, I think the balance of evidence tips pretty clearly in the direction that people with low-ish levels would be wise to supplement.

Am I certain that vitamin D is beneficial for people with low-ish levels? Absolutely not! But I claim that's the best bet given the limits of our knowledge.

The classical view: Boring bone vitamin

Most vitamins are "ingredients" that the body uses to do stuff. Vitamin D is more [...]

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Outline:

(01:19) The classical view: Boring bone vitamin

[... 14 more sections]

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First published:

June 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sF5gAxnmifQe2TBNt/the-worthlessness-of-vitamin-d-is-mildly-exaggerated

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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I was chatting with someone tonight about a planned documentary; they had interviewed various people in AI safety, and we got to discussing who they should talk to from an e/acc (effective accelerationist) perspective. I also watched The AI Doc recently, and they also dedicated a serious chunk of it to ‘optimists’ with e/acc founder ‘Beff Jezos’ perhaps given the most screen time. Here and elsewhere, people seem to treat e/acc as a substantial contrary-to-AI-safety cultural movement, worth engaging with.

But is it? Are there even many e/accs? There seem to be very few notable ones. Beff Jezos is perhaps the most prominent, and aside from founding e/acc he seems to be not distinguishable on casual perusal from a normal crank (his company claims to be developing super-energy-efficient computing hardware based on probabilistic processes).

The intellectual tenets of e/acc seem to be pretty unclear.

The apparent counterarguments to AI risk raised in situations like the AI doc seem to be widely agreed on by everyone in AI Safety, so don’t explain the disagreement. For instance:

AI will be able to do lots of great things, such as cure diseases, make new materials and do all [...]

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First published:

June 24th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3hwrWDf7wiqASDzBz/what-is-up-with-e-acc

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.