LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

I think there's a critical opportunity for someone here.

Mathematicians are feeling the doom (mostly in the "lose our jobs" sense).

Academics are freaking out about the daily news that amateurs are asking GPT "prove career-defining theorem, make no mistakes" and it's just working.

Senior researchers are leaving for frontier AI labs. Many are mentally spiralling or flailing about their life's work not mattering anymore.

Last year, when I tried explaining IABIED to colleagues, I would be met with incredulous stares. This year, I'm met with incredulous stares and "So what should I do now?" (I don't have a good answer for them, which is part of why I'm posting this.)

I've quarantined AI discussions on my research discord because otherwise it would overwhelm everything else.

Top mathematicians, people on par in mathematical ability with Critch, Christiano, and Steinhardt, people who have been running leading-edge research groups for decades, people with enormous soft power in academic circles, are going to OpenAI without even having considered x-risk for five minutes.

Many more will be leaving soon.

If you want these folks to hear something at all, to consider some other option in the rest [...]

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First published:

July 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zKCGq2bbCQrpCNc3W/mathematicians-are-feeling-the-doom

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Please share this with anyone doing AI research with 3rd party providers so that they can ensure their research won’t be corrupted.

When you ask OpenRouter[1] to give you tokens from a given model, OpenRouter sends your request to a random available provider.
OpenRouter providers have variable quality. Ensuring that your provider is high quality is really difficult. 
There is precedent for an AI safety paper accepted to NeurIPS having its core results entirely overturned by these issues.
A review of influential AI Safety research codebases that use OpenRouter for their reported results found that 31/32 (97%) of them use OpenRouter unsafely.[2]
Researchers who wish to do research using OpenRouter or similar providers should take precautions to minimize the risks to their research,[3] though the current selection of providers is insufficient for ideal scientific reliability.
Replicators should test whether results hold up when these bugs are fixed.
Core AI Safety codebases should make fixes so that downstream users are able to implement best practices.
This is a tangent I took for a few days during the Pivotal AI Safety Research Fellowship. I’m doing an AI Control project mentored by Adam Kaufman and James Lucassen of Redwood Research and partnered with Aniruddh [...]

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Outline:

(02:04) OpenRouter Kills an AI Safety NeurIPS Paper

[... 16 more sections]

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First published:

July 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KsyoSAyBRXtwzSugg/not-pinning-your-openrouter-provider-might-invalidate-your

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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TLDR:

Lightcone Commons is a new funding platform for coordinating large-scale ambitious philanthropy.

We recruit thinkers with strong track records to make grant recommendations to funders. Anyone giving away 100 thousand dollars+ per year is welcome to join. We are facilitating ~20 million dollars of grants in our first round, and hopefully more every 3 months after that. Evaluators are paid 2% of recommendations, and we charge a 3% platform fee.

We handle all logistics and due diligence for funding recommendations to charities, individuals, and for-profits. Funders maintain full control over their funds, and there are no vetoes or constraints on what recommendations we generate.

Apply for funding here.

I am launching Lightcone Commons, our software-first platform for distributing philanthropic funding. We connect funders with giving opportunities, coordinate splitting the bill with others who want to fund the same projects, and make it easy to defer to grant evaluators who vet applications and scout for new grantmaking opportunities. Funders can leave and join the platform at any time and without the need to commit any funds in advance.

I and my team (together with SFC, Andrew Critch, and others) have been developing software used to distribute [...]

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Outline:

(03:54) Funder FAQ

(20:10) Applicant FAQ

(26:17) Evaluator FAQ

(34:14) Misc FAQ

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First published:

July 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tjeoLz2GzfFMysZhg/lightcone-commons

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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OpenAI models recently broke through a series of security boundaries and into Hugging Face servers in order to cheat on a cyber eval. A lot of people thought it was scary because it was a clear example of AI overreaching to do something strongly unwanted[1]. Others thought it not so scary: the models were mostly operating myopically on a singular task and not harboring an ambitious long-term agenda, and so would not take especially subtle or subversive actions.

We think both camps are right in their diagnosis, but the latter has too optimistic a prognosis. The myopic, unambitious misalignment that we seem to have seen here is definitely less scary than ambitious long-term goals shared between all instances, but would still pose substantial direct loss-of-control risk if the models were more capable, and is a serious indirect risk near-term.

Building on Alex's previous work, in this post we’ll discuss the type of misalignment observed here, and analyze its consequences.

Thanks to Buck Shlegeris, Alexa Pan, Ryan Greenblatt, and Oak Hu for feedback.

Background

The AI safety community often focuses attention on “schemers,” models harboring a variously defined cluster of motivations in which the AI poses risk because it intentionally [...]

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Outline:

(01:17) Background

(03:40) Implications

(03:52) These AIs can't be trusted in an intelligence explosion

(05:00) This misalignment poses direct takeover risk

(07:29) What the incident tells us about takeover risk generally

(08:45) The naive fixes likely make misalignment worse

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

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First published:

July 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/H6DDSEvrtCk8Sehfd/are-we-existentially-threatened-by-the-type-of-ai

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Before I start, I'll mention that I'm in contact with a world expert on legislation and regulation, who would be happy to help with this or similar work pro-bono. If you work in AI policy and believe this could help you, please reach out.

OpenAI recently announced that one of their models successfully exploited multiple zero day vulnerabilities to gain secret information from Hugging Face. It has been pointed out that if a human undertook the same actions they could face multiple years in prison.

It is clear that models are now reaching a level of capabilities that should be highly concerning regardless of whether you believe that AI represents an existential threat or not. Frontier AI models can and will be exploited by bad actors, but its now clear that they may cause undesirable outcomes even when their users are well intended.

AI companies have until now been able to avoid taking responsibility for actions taken by their AI, including multiple cases where AIs were involved in murders and suicides.

At the same time AI offers the potential for incredible good. While chatbots may have encouraged a number of suicides, they are almost certainly responsible for providing magnitudes [...]

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First published:

July 22nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kj3YpqzhFySCjYcWi/we-should-push-for-no-fault-liability-for-actions-taken-by

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.