Best LessWrong Curated Podcasts (2025)

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“AI Induced Psychosis: A shallow investigation” by Tim Hua 56:46

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1h ago56:46

56:46

“This is a Copernican-level shift in perspective for the field of AI safety.” - Gemini 2.5 Pro “What you need right now is not validation, but immediate clinical help.” - Kimi K2 Two Minute Summary There have been numerous media reports of AI-driven psychosis, where AIs validate users’ grandiose delusions and tell users to ignore their friends’ and…

1
“Before LLM Psychosis, There Was Yes-Man Psychosis” by johnswentworth 5:26

24m ago5:26

5:26

A studio executive has no beliefs That's the way of a studio system We've bowed to every rear of all the studio chiefs And you can bet your ass we've kissed 'em Even the birds in the Hollywood hills Know the secret to our success It's those magical words that pay the bills Yes, yes, yes, and yes! “Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking”, from SMASH S…

1
“Training a Reward Hacker Despite Perfect Labels” by ariana_azarbal, vgillioz, TurnTrout 13:19

1d ago13:19

13:19

Summary: Perfectly labeled outcomes in training can still boost reward hacking tendencies in generalization. This can hold even when the train/test sets are drawn from the exact same distribution. We induce this surprising effect via a form of context distillation, which we call re-contextualization: Generate model completions with a hack-encouragi…

1
“Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)” by habryka 51:47

4d ago51:47

51:47

It's been roughly 7 years since the LessWrong user-base voted on whether it's time to close down shop and become an archive, or to move towards the LessWrong 2.0 platform, with me as head-admin. For roughly equally long have I spent around one hundred hours almost every year trying to get Said Achmiz to understand and learn how to become a good Les…

1
“Underdog bias rules everything around me” by Richard_Ngo 13:26

4d ago13:26

13:26

People very often underrate how much power they (and their allies) have, and overrate how much power their enemies have. I call this “underdog bias”, and I think it's the most important cognitive bias for understanding modern society. I’ll start by describing a closely-related phenomenon. The hostile media effect is a well-known bias whereby people…

1
“Epistemic advantages of working as a moderate” by Buck 5:59

5d ago5:59

5:59

Many people who are concerned about existential risk from AI spend their time advocating for radical changes to how AI is handled. Most notably, they advocate for costly restrictions on how AI is developed now and in the future, e.g. the Pause AI people or the MIRI people. In contrast, I spend most of my time thinking about relatively cheap interve…

1
“Four ways Econ makes people dumber re: future AI” by Steven Byrnes 14:01

5d ago14:01

14:01

(Cross-posted from X, intended for a general audience.) There's a funny thing where economics education paradoxically makes people DUMBER at thinking about future AI. Econ textbooks teach concepts & frames that are great for most things, but counterproductive for thinking about AGI. Here are 4 examples. Longpost: THE FIRST PIECE of Econ anti-pedago…

1
“Should you make stone tools?” by Alex_Altair 6:02

6d ago6:02

6:02

Knowing how evolution works gives you an enormously powerful tool to understand the living world around you and how it came to be that way. (Though it's notoriously hard to use this tool correctly, to the point that I think people mostly shouldn't try it use it when making substantial decisions.) The simple heuristic is "other people died because t…

1
“My AGI timeline updates from GPT-5 (and 2025 so far)” by ryan_greenblatt 7:26

6d ago7:26

7:26

As I discussed in a prior post, I felt like there were some reasonably compelling arguments for expecting very fast AI progress in 2025 (especially on easily verified programming tasks). Concretely, this might have looked like reaching 8 hour 50% reliability horizon lengths on METR's task suite[1] by now due to greatly scaling up RL and getting lar…

1
“Hyperbolic model fits METR capabilities estimate worse than exponential model” by gjm 8:16

7d ago8:16

8:16

This is a response to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mXa66dPR8hmHgndP5/hyperbolic-trend-with-upcoming-singularity-fits-metr which claims that a hyperbolic model, complete with an actual singularity in the near future, is a better fit for the METR time-horizon data than a simple exponential model. I think that post has a serious error in it and its…

1
“My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Lighthaven” by Zack_M_Davis 10:06

8d ago10:06

10:06

On 12 August 2025, I sat down with New York Times reporter Cade Metz to discuss some criticisms of his 4 August 2025 article, "The Rise of Silicon Valley's Techno-Religion". The transcript below has been edited for clarity. ZMD: In accordance with our meetings being on the record in both directions, I have some more questions for you. I did not rea…

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“Church Planting: When Venture Capital Finds Jesus” by Elizabeth 31:18

10d ago31:18

31:18

I’m going to describe a Type Of Guy starting a business, and you’re going to guess the business: The founder is very young, often under 25. He might work alone or with a founding team, but when he tells the story of the founding it will always have him at the center. He has no credentials for this business. This business has a grand vision, which h…

1
“Somebody invented a better bookmark” by Alex_Altair 3:35

11d ago3:35

3:35

This will only be exciting to those of us who still read physical paper books. But like. Guys. They did it. They invented the perfect bookmark. Classic paper bookmarks fall out easily. You have to put them somewhere while you read the book. And they only tell you that you left off reading somewhere in that particular two-page spread. Enter the Book…

1
“How Does A Blind Model See The Earth?” by henry 20:39

15d ago20:39

20:39

Sometimes I'm saddened remembering that we've viewed the Earth from space. We can see it all with certainty: there's no northwest passage to search for, no infinite Siberian expanse, and no great uncharted void below the Cape of Good Hope. But, of all these things, I most mourn the loss of incomplete maps. In the earliest renditions of the world, y…

1
“Re: Recent Anthropic Safety Research” by Eliezer Yudkowsky 9:00

16d ago9:00

9:00

A reporter asked me for my off-the-record take on recent safety research from Anthropic. After I drafted an off-the-record reply, I realized that I was actually fine with it being on the record, so: Since I never expected any of the current alignment technology to work in the limit of superintelligence, the only news to me is about when and how ear…

1
“How anticipatory cover-ups go wrong” by Kaj_Sotala 10:43

19d ago10:43

10:43

1. Back when COVID vaccines were still a recent thing, I witnessed a debate that looked like something like the following was happening: Some official institution had collected information about the efficacy and reported side-effects of COVID vaccines. They felt that, correctly interpreted, this information was compatible with vaccines being broadl…

1
“SB-1047 Documentary: The Post-Mortem” by Michaël Trazzi 9:42

19d ago9:42

9:42

Below some meta-level / operational / fundraising thoughts around producing the SB-1047 Documentary I've just posted on Manifund (see previous Lesswrong / EAF posts on AI Governance lessons learned). The SB-1047 Documentary took 27 weeks and $157k instead of my planned 6 weeks and $55k. Here's what I learned about documentary production Total fundi…

1
“METR’s Evaluation of GPT-5” by GradientDissenter 48:28

19d ago48:28

48:28

METR (where I work, though I'm cross-posting in a personal capacity) evaluated GPT-5 before it was externally deployed. We performed a much more comprehensive safety analysis than we ever have before; it feels like pre-deployment evals are getting more mature. This is the first time METR has produced something we've felt comfortable calling an "eva…

1
“Emotions Make Sense” by DaystarEld 36:21

21d ago36:21

36:21

For the past five years I've been teaching a class at various rationality camps, workshops, conferences, etc. I’ve done it maybe 50 times in total, and I think I’ve only encountered a handful out of a few hundred teenagers and adults who really had a deep sense of what it means for emotions to “make sense.” Even people who have seen Inside Out, and…

1
“The Problem” by Rob Bensinger, tanagrabeast, yams, So8res, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gretta Duleba 49:32

22d ago49:32

49:32

This is a new introduction to AI as an extinction threat, previously posted to the MIRI website in February alongside a summary. It was written independently of Eliezer and Nate's forthcoming book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and isn't a sneak peak of the book. Since the book is long and costs money, we expect this to be a valuable resource…

1
“Many prediction markets would be better off as batched auctions” by William Howard 9:18

23d ago9:18

9:18

All prediction market platforms trade continuously, which is the same mechanism the stock market uses. Buy and sell limit orders can be posted at any time, and as soon as they match against each other a trade will be executed. This is called a Central limit order book (CLOB). Example of a CLOB order book from Polymarket Most of the time, the market…

1
“Whence the Inkhaven Residency?” by Ben Pace 4:44

23d ago4:44

4:44

Essays like Paul Graham's, Scott Alexander's, and Eliezer Yudkowsky's have influenced a generation of people in how they think about startups, ethics, science, and the world as a whole. Creating essays that good takes a lot of skill, practice, and talent, but it looks to me that a lot of people with talent aren't putting in the work and developing …

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“I am worried about near-term non-LLM AI developments” by testingthewaters 10:54

26d ago10:54

10:54

TL;DR I believe that: Almost all LLM-centric safety research will not provide any significant safety value with regards to existential or civilisation-scale risks. The capabilities-related forecasts (not the safety-related forecasts) of Stephen Brynes' Foom and Doom articles are correct, except that they are too conservative with regards to timelin…

1
“Optimizing The Final Output Can Obfuscate CoT (Research Note)” by lukemarks, jacob_drori, cloud, TurnTrout 11:30

28d ago11:30

11:30

Produced as part of MATS 8.0 under the mentorship of Alex Turner and Alex Cloud. This research note overviews some early results which we are looking for feedback on. TL;DR: We train language models with RL in toy environments. We show that penalizing some property of the output is sufficient to suppress that property in the chain of thought also, …

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“About 30% of Humanity’s Last Exam chemistry/biology answers are likely wrong” by bohaska 6:40

29d ago6:40

6:40

FutureHouse is a company that builds literature research agents. They tested it on the bio + chem subset of HLE questions, then noticed errors in them. The post's first paragraph: Humanity's Last Exam has become the most prominent eval representing PhD-level research. We found the questions puzzling and investigated with a team of experts in biolog…