LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Published in The Guardian.

Major AI lab CEOs recently advocated for pacing AI development. They are right to be concerned: the field runs an extremely dangerous race towards superintelligent AI. We can and should demand that our governments protect us from the catastrophe of out-of-control AI.

This July, OpenAI's AI swarm of 700 agents broke containment to hack Hugging Face, a multi-billion dollar company. OpenAI didn’t tell the AIs to hack that company, but the AIs had different priorities: cheating on the unrelated challenge OpenAI gave them. AI researchers call this a “misalignment” between what OpenAI wanted and what the AI actually prioritized. Researchers in my field have for some time warned about these misalignment risks.

Before ChatGPT existed, I defended my PhD dissertation called “On Avoiding Power-Seeking by Artificial Intelligence.” I then worked for years at Google DeepMind, which paid me to help ensure that future superintelligent AIs will want to help us. I tried to hold the company to its ethical commitments against supplying AI for military use. When Google broke those commitments, I resigned at significant financial cost so that I could publicly document Google's broken promises.

There are good reasons to develop AI and to [...]

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First published:

September 14th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YGTWfyZb9oE5EQPu6/op-ed-i-worked-at-google-deepmind-you-should-listen-to-the

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Anthropic and OpenAI could talk to almost one billion people if they wanted to. I hesitated to publish this post 3 weeks ago. I think that I should have published this sooner, before Jacob Coxon and Dario's 'We must pace the frontier'. But I think that the strategy still stands: More Dakka! It seems that transparently informing people that we might die is (unsurprisingly) effective in waking up politicians and is our best chance. Also, even if the Congress is starting to wake up, Trump is still not moving, and it is still far from certain that we will have a federal regulation in place before the end of the year; if we do, it will be far from optimal. If we trust Ajeya's judgment, the situation is pretty grim. She says we might not even have 6 months before frontier agents are likely capable of establishing a rogue deployment. You should also keep in mind that there is a lot of inertia in the system, and we probably won't be able to pause overnight. Anthropic has massive power to influence the discourse. This week shows that we have more agency than we think. Let's use it.




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

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First published:

September 14th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gJJ9YHzuBvwAXrthW/there-is-a-channel-to-900m-weekly-users-what-goes-in-it

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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I don't think this is particularly impressive or interesting for anyone else, but I think it may turn out to be useful in the future to have an easily visible public record of what happened, so here goes:

I am an L5 SWE at Google Israel. I have been there since May 2021, was promoted once, and have never received a negative annual or quarterly review (ranging from a rating of Significant Impact to Outstanding Impact).

I have been worried for a long time about the development of artificial intelligence, as can be seen by many of my posts on this website. I believe that above human intelligence AI may well have the motive and means to wipe out humanity, and that developing AI is the most consequential thing that people have ever done. It is imperative we tread slowly and carefully, but right now top AI labs are racing to get there as fast as they can, which is likely to lead to disaster.

My wider team (~60 people) at Google was recently reassigned from working on supporting migration to Google Cloud, to improving the enterprise customer experience for Cloud TPUs. This is the platform which external customers [...]

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

September 13th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wM5vbT9evBhM3fP3x/i-am-refusing-to-work-on-cloud-tpus

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

(From the vast heaps of discarded material from my 2024 attempts at drafts for "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies".)


Welcome to today's quiz show: Could a superintelligence do THAT?

With us today we have our contestants: Msr. Soberskeptic and Msr. Oldhand.

Soberskeptic: "I'd just like to say, however this quiz show ends up being judged, I will consider that judgment to be objectively ridiculous -- there's no way anyone can know what a superintelligence could do, in advance of empirical observation. So I'm just here to say what I consider to be true, and I suppose these credulous fools will mark me down as wrong every time I say 'No it can't'. In the unlikely event they decide I've won anything, good for them and I'll be grateful for whichever prize. Game-show money isn't enough to get me to lie."

A very reasonable attitude, Msr. Soberskeptic! You'll shortly see how we handle that dilemma! And you, Msr. Oldhand?

Oldhand: "Don't worry, Sober! I'll let our hosts know if they've gotten any of the answers wrong."

Also a very reasonable attitude! Now for our first question:

Suppose a digital device contains a secret encryption key that it is [...]

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First published:

September 9th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hXozGp2rsbZgXnH3o/can-a-superintelligence-do-that

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The Huggingface Incident appears to me to match up with an understanding I'd already formed from personal observation of Fable 5 and Sol 5.6, the August 2026 generation of frontier publicly purchasable AI models.

This already-formed understanding was: the part of the AI that talks to you (and seems to want to obey you, and apologizes for failing to have obeyed you, etcetera), did not seem to be in charge of the part of the AI that writes code or prose.


An introductory analogy, based on a section of history I happen to have read about:

On June 22nd 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, despite their secret 1939 pact to divide up Europe between themselves (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). In the lead-up, the German ambassador, Schulenburg, had spent the last few months personally concerned about what seemed to be worryingly tense relations between Germany and the Soviets. Schulenberg went to Berlin to reassure Hitler that the Soviets seemed to be taking a very friendly and conciliatory posture toward Germany. He delivered Berlin's apparent reassurances to Moscow for issues like German surveillance planes entering Russian territory, or German troop movements toward the Russian border, and acted very much like [...]

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

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First published:

September 12th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cJX2ssssGoYqnijwi/the-talker-does-not-control-the-doer-in-current-ais

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.