LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Look, I'm as much of a Rationalist with a special interest in AI x-risk as anyone. But oh my god do I hate talking about "P(doom)". When it first started showing up in the wake of ChatGPT, I assumed that it was floating around variously adjacent circles of faux-intellectuals, but surely everyone in my circles could see how braindead it was... right?

(This post was partially inspired by a recent conversation with Liron about Doom Debates.[1])

I guess it's time for me to focus on a place where I'm shocked that everyone else is dropping the ball.[2]

P(doom) is Hopelessly Vague

Let's start with the ambiguity. Does "doom" mean... extinction? A lot of people think so! I have personally encountered people who think catastrophic harms from AI are likely, but the risks of all humans dying are low. They're like "Sure, 99.999% of humans might die from AI, but the AI will obviously want to keep thousands of humans alive for science and potential trade with aliens and stuff, so my P(doom) is approximately 0%."

That might sound crazy. Surely you, dear reader, know exactly what "doom" means. You know, for example, which of these count as doom and [...]

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Outline:

(00:45) P(doom) is Hopelessly Vague

[... 4 more sections]

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First published:

June 29th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6h7aAd4aw8YgCAbF6/p-doom-is-a-dumb-meme

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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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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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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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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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