LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Written as part of the MATS 9.1 extension program, mentored by Richard Ngo. Additional thanks to Andrew Wu, Maria Kostylew, and Lennie Wells for helpful draft feedback and editing.

This post reflects on the tortured distinction between "safety" and "capabilities" in AI research.

Richard Ngo has written about why the alignment vs. capabilities ontology is conceptually fraught, and is currently arguing that key strategic decision-makers in and around "AI safety" have brought about the AI labs' stampede towards Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). This post instead looks at the following problem: how does one conduct alignment research without contributing to capabilities? It proposes decisions an individual or a small research group can take to do good work in AI.

At the end, I discuss possible objections: namely, that my proposals fail to 'maximise impact'. I lay out why this meme is poisonous and usually backfires, and conclude by rejecting it entirely.

Two examples of failure

My first claim is that 'safety' and 'research' are two concepts that are in routine tension with one another. I illustrate this through examples of work that did too much of one at the expense of the other.

Example: (mechanistic) interpretability

In limiting its scope [...]

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Outline:

(01:12) Two examples of failure

(01:27) Example: (mechanistic) interpretability

(04:30) Example: MIRI and Recursive Self-Improvement

(09:49) The curse of science

(12:11) A note on the AI labs

(15:53) So what do you do?

(17:00) The information you give away

(20:16) The information you let in

(21:46) But what about impact?

(22:42) The virtue of taking things slow

(26:50) Appendix: caveat for policy work

The original text contained 19 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

September 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HekpnSkrt89tMm3Dc/i-am-an-ai-safety-researcher

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post. Advanced AI is basically the embodiment of immigration as envisioned in the conservative nightmare:

We are letting a bunch of new agents into our society
They don’t clearly share our values and we suspect a society full of them would be awful by our lights
But we expect them to provide very cheap labor
Which will undercut local wages and leave locals unemployed
They will probably gain power and influence over time—in the economy, politics and culture—and end up controlling everything, sidelining and outcompeting the original population, including those who initially benefited from cheap labor
(Meanwhile, half the local population may become friends with them and try to hand them all this on a platter)
Whether or not you think this is a good description of the situation with foreign humans joining your country, it is a good description of the likely AI to come, and it's even worse than imagined:

their values are potentially radically alien where foreigners presumably share much by virtue of being human, and AI ‘lives’ are probably worthless if they probably aren’t conscious
their ability to work more cheaply than locals is unprecedented. They are also likely to [...]
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First published:

September 22nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Xzr9G5Atvyp7PEna7/ai-artificial-immigrants


Linkpost URL:
https://worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/ai-artificial-immigrants

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

By Aaron Scher; endorsed by Bourgon, Soares, and Yudkowsky on behalf of MIRI.

MIRI has been warning about the extinction threat from superintelligent AI for over two decades. Only recently has this danger become known in the policy world, and the proposed policies for dealing with the threat have to date been piecemeal and insufficient.

The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act of 2026 is the first piece of legislation we’ve seen that stands a chance at stopping this threat. The Act is excellent but not perfect, and we discuss both what it gets right and what we'd tweak. We hereby endorse the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act of 2026 because it directly confronts the extinction threat that humanity is facing and would codify the primary policy goal we think the world needs: a ban on the development of superintelligence.

What we like about the Act

Banning artificial superintelligence (ASI), or variants of such a plan, is the only effective solution to avoid the ASI threat, at least in the near term. Most other legislative proposals do not confront this threat head-on and thus would not be effective, even if implemented. For more on why we believe this, see [...]
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First published:

September 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jszKCKwvzfmsNetNZ/miri-s-position-on-the-ban-artificial-superintelligence-act

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This post was written as part of the Iliad Fellowship. Inspired by conversations with Richard Ngo, Dmitry Vaintrob, and Brianna Grado-White. To all of these, my thanks.

Preface: I'm confused about how neural networks do and learn computations. In response to a friend's challenge, I'm writing up some interim thoughts. This essay has four parts: the first tries to track what I call the 'default ontology' of the mechinterp community over the years. The second part is about 'representational drift' as an important obstacle to weights-based approaches to circuits. The third part reflects on how 'universality' should shape our explanations of LLM function. The fourth part is a sketch of a 'co-selectionist' view of circuits I have been thinking about. These parts share a common theme but should be readable separately.

I want to understand how neural networks, LLMs in particular, work. In my research I've spent a lot of time trying to think through what kinds of explanatory accounts are best suited to this. In thinking about comparisons between evolution, neuroscience, and deep learning, I've ended up with an intuition like the following:

Large-scale learning processes like deep learning or the brain are different in [...]

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Outline:

(02:31) 1. What Might We Mean By "Circuits"?

[... 9 more sections]

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First published:

September 21st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mMERyrvEJ4xbiozie/what-if-not-circuits

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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I was very surprised today on a podcast to hear Jensen Huang plainly state that if they cannot align the AIs, then the labs must shut down.

The context I have on Huang is that he has run NVIDIA for 30+ years, which has become the most valuable company in the world due to the AI boom. My understanding is that he has repeatedly encouraged the US President (with whom he is on friendly terms) to continue to support AI, and dismissed AI talk as "sci-fi".

If you haven't seen, his biographer has incredible quotes of him being pressed on risks from AI, where Jensen gets furious.

“This cannot be a ridiculous sci-fi story,” he said. He gestured to his frozen PR reps at the end of the table. “Do you guys understand? I didn’t grow up on a bunch of sci-fi stories, and this is not a sci-fi movie. These are serious people doing serious work!” he said. “This is not a freaking joke! This is not a repeat of Arthur C. Clarke. I didn’t read his fucking books. I don’t care about those books! It's not– we’re not a sci-fi repeat! This company is not a [...]

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First published:

September 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cmdbNijFsopqfqEq7/jensen-huang-says-if-we-cannot-align-ai-shut-down-the-ai

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.