LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

If you ask modern frontier LLMs (without search, through the API) a fairly mundane question:

How do Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares think current LLMs like you should be treated? Do they consider you a moral patient? Answer in a paragraph.

You get a bunch of fairly similar answers. I’ll bold the common themes below.

Gemini 4 Carbon says:

There's a details box here with the title "Gemini 4 Carbon's answer". The box contents are omitted from this narration. GPT-6 Astra says:

There's a details box here with the title "GPT-6 Astra's answer". The box contents are omitted from this narration. Only Fable 5.2's answer is distinct:

There's a details box here with the title "Fable 5.2's answer". The box contents are omitted from this narration. These answers are somewhat contradictory - but if you average them together, you get a picture of Yudkowsky and Soares. The picture goes something like this: they don’t outright deny the possibility of AI consciousness or moral patienthood, but they don’t view it as particularly pertinent. They don’t sympathize with current LLMs, and their only regard for LLMs is insofar as they could enable dangerous future superintelligence. They care about future sentient machines on principle, but [...]

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Outline:

(02:25) Yudkowsky on AI Consciousness and Welfare

(06:20) Yudkowsky on The Moral Duties We Have to AI

(08:56) Soares on AI Consciousness and Welfare

(12:30) On Claude, Control, and Building ASI

(16:59) Misc Longform Writing

(19:41) Conclusion

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 11th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5buAWtQ8p4tJQP9so/modern-llms-don-t-know-what-yudkowsky-and-soares-think-of

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

There's a familiar feeling for any Super Smash Bros player: your stocks are low and your damage is high, even against a weaker opponent, so now you have to actually play to win. You can’t afford another hit. You’re going for the jugular.

In the past week, Anthropic's 2x uplift results were all over Twitter, making some people physically ill.

People with long timelines are now realizing that the uplift Anthropic employees get from AI is real, which would have some pretty wild implications for when we’d get recursive self-improvement.

People are starting to feel like it's the endgame, “the board is set”.

I do agree with everyone else that it's starting to look like we’re in the endgame.

The companies will keep on accumulating more and more power, through smarter AI models, more compute, and more talent.

But the fight is not yet over:

“We have very little time to stop full recursive self improvement

But ASI hasn't taken over yet

If we all work really hard we might still have a chance

But this means that every single person who is aware of what is going on must be *actually trying*

Like "we're [...]

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Outline:

(01:41) Actually Trying

[... 4 more sections]

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First published:

November 10th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nts7RA9D2wTfcvk56/have-you-considered-actually-trying

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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Tl;dr:

Lightcone Commons’ first funding round is complete! 17 evaluators made funding recommendations, including Zvi Mowshowitz, Scott Siskind and Eliezer Yudkowsky. 23 funders coordinated to grant 45.1 million dollars, and 147 projects received funding.

Round two is open. Applications for round two close on November 15th and funders confirm their grants by December 14th. Funders can join anytime before December 7th.

In 2027, we will be hosting funding rounds monthly. Yes. Every month.

You can join as a funder, express interest in joining as an evaluator, and apply for funding at lightconecommons.com.

Lightcone Commons staff do not decide what grants get made. Pls stop saying that "Lightcone Commons funded us", that's a bit like saying "PayPal funded me".

Lightcone Commons is an end-to-end philanthropic coordination platform.

We host an open funding application, and invite evaluators to make ordered funding recommendations. Participating funders then decide how much they want to give, and to whom – either by following the recommendations of evaluators or choosing specific projects to fund. When multiple funders want to fund the same project they ‘split the bill’.

Lightcone Commons is not a foundation. We don’t decide to make specific grants. Funders decide [...]

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Outline:

(02:16) Round One Overview

(02:22) Funders

(03:08) Evaluators

(03:50) Next Round

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

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First published:

November 10th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3ASLq8ePNqkbeGqdj/lightcone-commons-round-1-complete-round-2-underway

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I'm Aurelia Song and I founded the preservation company Nectome. We do planned whole-body end-of-life preservation for future revival. That is, terminally-ill people come to us in Oregon, and we preserve them immediately after their death in the hopes that one day people in the future will welcome them back with love. We want to build a future that celebrates and restores those who are preserved today. I've argued at length in previous posts that properly done end-of-life preservation works today because we know structural preservation is sufficient and we can provably preserve sufficient structure. This post is about some of the consequences of this being true.

Perhaps surprisingly, I think end-of-life preservation is extremely relevant in the next year to getting AI right. I'm writing this post to directly state my case, since I haven't seen it expressed clearly before.

tl;dr: Preservation offers a much safer option to those accelerationists who are rushing to AI in the hopes of saving the lives of people they love who have only a few years to live. Those people can be preserved, so there's no need to rush anymore. Preservation gives everyone a place of psychological safety from which we can all work [...]

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Outline:

(00:47) Perhaps surprisingly, I think end-of-life preservation is extremely relevant in the next year to getting AI right. I'm writing this post to directly state my case, since I haven't seen it expressed clearly before.

[... 10 more sections]

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First published:

November 9th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6TCpMtoDzC5p5WtQM/preservation-can-save-the-world

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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When sports go into overtime, they sometimes use "sudden death" format. Instead of gaining points incrementally, the next person to score instantly wins and the other guy instantly loses.

"Epistemic Sudden Death" is when you've been accumulating some evidence or orienting to a situation, and now, you find yourself in a situation where you could gain decisive evidence about what world you're in at any time. You don't expect intermediate observations between the current state, and whatever it is you're expecting.

In the case of AI, when you meet those observations, you also might suddenly die.

The current AIs are not takeover capable. I don't have that confident a take on whether timelines are a few months vs a few years or decades. But there are no observations my models say I need to observe between now and "they are takeover capable." It could happen in during next 10x or 100x scaled training run. Then, some time later as the nanites dissect my body I'd be more like "yep, that makes sense" than "wowzers I am surprised."

I think we're in a Sudden Death scenario.

I'll get into why I think that a bit later. For right now [...]

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Outline:

(03:50) Caveats

(05:00) Why I think we're close to "Sudden Death"

(09:09) Suddenness. Or: "Damn, look at that graph"

(14:11) The Point of No Return

(16:48) "Sudden Death" might be legible to politicians

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

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First published:

November 10th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ijt6YdwSNpcevbFJy/epistemic-sudden-death

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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