For months, I had the feeling: something is wrong. Some core part of myself had gone missing. I had words and ideas cached, which pointed back to the missing part. There was the story of Benjamin Jesty, a dairy farmer who vaccinated his family against smallpox in 1774 - 20 years before the vaccination technique was popularized, and the same year Ki…

(Disclaimer: Post written in a personal capacity. These are personal hot takes and do not in any way represent my employer's views.) TL;DR: I do not think we will produce high reliability methods to evaluate or monitor the safety of superintelligent systems via current research paradigms, with interpretability or otherwise. Interpretability seems a…

It'll take until ~2050 to repeat the level of scaling that pretraining compute is experiencing this decade, as increasing funding can't sustain the current pace beyond ~2029 if AI doesn't deliver a transformative commercial success by then. Natural text data will also run out around that time, and there are signs that current methods of reasoning t…

In this blog post, we analyse how the recent AI 2027 forecast by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean has been discussed across Chinese language platforms. We present: Our research methodology and synthesis of key findings across media artefacts A proposal for how censorship patterns may provide signal for t…

This is a link post. to follow up my philantropic pledge from 2020, i've updated my philanthropy page with the 2024 results. in 2024 my donations funded $51M worth of endpoint grants (plus $2.0M in admin overhead and philanthropic software development). this comfortably exceeded my 2024 commitment of $42M (20k times $2100.00 — the minimum price of …

I’ve been thinking recently about what sets apart the people who’ve done the best work at Anthropic. You might think that the main thing that makes people really effective at research or engineering is technical ability, and among the general population that's true. Among people hired at Anthropic, though, we’ve restricted the range by screening fo…

This is a link post. Guillaume Blanc has a piece in Works in Progress (I assume based on his paper) about how France's fertility declined earlier than in other European countries, and how its power waned as its relative population declined starting in the 18th century. In 1700, France had 20% of Europe's population (4% of the whole world population…

We’ve written a new report on the threat of AI-enabled coups. I think this is a very serious risk – comparable in importance to AI takeover but much more neglected. In fact, AI-enabled coups and AI takeover have pretty similar threat models. To see this, here's a very basic threat model for AI takeover: Humanity develops superhuman AI Superhuman AI…

Back in the 1990s, ground squirrels were briefly fashionable pets, but their popularity came to an abrupt end after an incident at Schiphol Airport on the outskirts of Amsterdam. In April 1999, a cargo of 440 of the rodents arrived on a KLM flight from Beijing, without the necessary import papers. Because of this, they could not be forwarded on to …

Subtitle: Bad for loss of control risks, bad for concentration of power risks I’ve had this sitting in my drafts for the last year. I wish I’d been able to release it sooner, but on the bright side, it’ll make a lot more sense to people who have already read AI 2027. There's a good chance that AGI will be trained before this decade is out. By AGI I…

Though, given my doomerism, I think the natsec framing of the AGI race is likely wrongheaded, let me accept the Dario/Leopold/Altman frame that AGI will be aligned to the national interest of a great power. These people seem to take as an axiom that a USG AGI will be better in some way than CCP AGI. Has anyone written justification for this assumpt…

Introduction Writing this post puts me in a weird epistemic position. I simultaneously believe that: The reasoning failures that I'll discuss are strong evidence that current LLM- or, more generally, transformer-based approaches won't get us AGI As soon as major AI labs read about the specific reasoning failures described here, they might fix them …

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently worried about a world where only 30% of jobs become automated, leading to class tensions between the automated and non-automated. Instead, he predicts that nearly all jobs will be automated simultaneously, putting everyone "in the same boat." However, based on my experience spanning AI research (including fi…

Audio note: this article contains 31 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Lewis Smith*, Sen Rajamanoharan*, Arthur Conmy, Callum McDougall, Janos Kramar, Tom Lieberum, Rohin Shah, Neel Nanda * = equal contribution The following piece is a list of snippet…

This is a link post. When I was a really small kid, one of my favorite activities was to try and dam up the creek in my backyard. I would carefully move rocks into high walls, pile up leaves, or try patching the holes with sand. The goal was just to see how high I could get the lake, knowing that if I plugged every hole, eventually the water would …

This is part of the MIRI Single Author Series. Pieces in this series represent the beliefs and opinions of their named authors, and do not claim to speak for all of MIRI. Okay, I'm annoyed at people covering AI 2027 burying the lede, so I'm going to try not to do that. The authors predict a strong chance that all humans will be (effectively) dead i…

Short AI takeoff timelines seem to leave no time for some lines of alignment research to become impactful. But any research rebalances the mix of currently legible research directions that could be handed off to AI-assisted alignment researchers or early autonomous AI researchers whenever they show up. So even hopelessly incomplete research agendas…

In this post, we present a replication and extension of an alignment faking model organism: Replication: We replicate the alignment faking (AF) paper and release our code. Classifier Improvements: We significantly improve the precision and recall of the AF classifier. We release a dataset of ~100 human-labelled examples of AF for which our classifi…

Summary: We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under five years, we will see AI agents that can independently complet…

“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orc…

In 2021 I wrote what became my most popular blog post: What 2026 Looks Like. I intended to keep writing predictions all the way to AGI and beyond, but chickened out and just published up till 2026. Well, it's finally time. I'm back, and this time I have a team with me: the AI Futures Project. We've written a concrete scenario of what we think the f…

Back when the OpenAI board attempted and failed to fire Sam Altman, we faced a highly hostile information environment. The battle was fought largely through control of the public narrative, and the above was my attempt to put together what happened.My conclusion, which I still believe, was that Sam Altman had engaged in a variety of unacceptable co…

Epistemic status: This post aims at an ambitious target: improving intuitive understanding directly. The model for why this is worth trying is that I believe we are more bottlenecked by people having good intuitions guiding their research than, for example, by the ability of people to code and run evals. Quite a few ideas in AI safety implicitly us…

I'm not writing this to alarm anyone, but it would be irresponsible not to report on something this important. On current trends, every car will be crashed in front of my house within the next week. Here's the data: Until today, only two cars had crashed in front of my house, several months apart, during the 15 months I have lived here. But a few h…

Remember: There is no such thing as a pink elephant. Recently, I was made aware that my “infohazards small working group” Signal chat, an informal coordination venue where we have frank discussions about infohazards and why it will be bad if specific hazards were leaked to the press or public, accidentally was shared with a deceitful and discredite…

Let's cut through the comforting narratives and examine a common behavioral pattern with a sharper lens: the stark difference between how anger is managed in professional settings versus domestic ones. Many individuals can navigate challenging workplace interactions with remarkable restraint, only to unleash significant anger or frustration at home…

In the debate over AI development, two movements stand as opposites: PauseAI calls for slowing down AI progress, and e/acc (effective accelerationism) calls for rapid advancement. But what if both sides are working against their own stated interests? What if the most rational strategy for each would be to adopt the other's tactics—if not their ulti…

Introduction Decision theory is about how to behave rationally under conditions of uncertainty, especially if this uncertainty involves being acausally blackmailed and/or gaslit by alien superintelligent basilisks. Decision theory has found numerous practical applications, including proving the existence of God and generating endless LessWrong comm…

Dear LessWrong community, It is with a sense of... considerable cognitive dissonance that I announce a significant development regarding the future trajectory of LessWrong. After extensive internal deliberation, modeling of potential futures, projections of financial runways, and what I can only describe as a series of profoundly unexpected coordin…

Our community is not prepared for an AI crash. We're good at tracking new capability developments, but not as much the company financials. Currently, both OpenAI and Anthropic are losing $5 billion+ a year, while under threat of losing users to cheap LLMs. A crash will weaken the labs. Funding-deprived and distracted, execs struggle to counter coor…

Epistemic status: Reasonably confident in the basic mechanism. Have you noticed that you keep encountering the same ideas over and over? You read another post, and someone helpfully points out it's just old Paul's idea again. Or Eliezer's idea. Not much progress here, move along. Or perhaps you've been on the other side: excitedly telling a friend …

[This is our blog post on the papers, which can be found at https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html and https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/methods.html.] Language models like Claude aren't programmed directly by humans—instead, they‘re trained on large amounts of data. During that training process…

About nine months ago, I and three friends decided that AI had gotten good enough to monitor large codebases autonomously for security problems. We started a company around this, trying to leverage the latest AI models to create a tool that could replace at least a good chunk of the value of human pentesters. We have been working on this project si…

(Audio version here (read by the author), or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. This is the fourth essay in a series that I’m calling “How do we solve the alignment problem?”. I’m hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see this introduction for a summary of the essays that have been released t…

LessWrong has been receiving an increasing number of posts and contents that look like they might be LLM-written or partially-LLM-written, so we're adopting a policy. This could be changed based on feedback. Humans Using AI as Writing or Research Assistants Prompting a language model to write an essay and copy-pasting the result will not typically …

Thanks to Jesse Richardson for discussion. Polymarket asks: will Jesus Christ return in 2025? In the three days since the market opened, traders have wagered over $100,000 on this question. The market traded as high as 5%, and is now stably trading at 3%. Right now, if you wanted to, you could place a bet that Jesus Christ will not return this year…

TL;DR Having a good research track record is some evidence of good big-picture takes, but it's weak evidence. Strategic thinking is hard, and requires different skills. But people often conflate these skills, leading to excessive deference to researchers in the field, without evidence that that person is good at strategic thinking specifically. Int…

When my son was three, we enrolled him in a study of a vision condition that runs in my family. They wanted us to put an eyepatch on him for part of each day, with a little sensor object that went under the patch and detected body heat to record when we were doing it. They paid for his first pair of glasses and all the eye doctor visits to check up…

I’m releasing a new paper “Superintelligence Strategy” alongside Eric Schmidt (formerly Google), and Alexandr Wang (Scale AI). Below is the executive summary, followed by additional commentary highlighting portions of the paper which might be relevant to this collection of readers. Executive Summary Rapid advances in AI are poised to reshape nearly…

This is a link post. Summary: We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under a decade, we will see AI agents that can in…

I have, over the last year, become fairly well-known in a small corner of the internet tangentially related to AI. As a result, I've begun making what I would have previously considered astronomical amounts of money: several hundred thousand dollars per month in personal income. This has been great, obviously, and the funds have alleviated a fair n…

Note: this is a research note based on observations from evaluating Claude Sonnet 3.7. We’re sharing the results of these ‘work-in-progress’ investigations as we think they are timely and will be informative for other evaluators and decision-makers. The analysis is less rigorous than our standard for a published paper. Summary We monitor Sonnet's r…

Scott Alexander famously warned us to Beware Trivial Inconveniences. When you make a thing easy to do, people often do vastly more of it. When you put up barriers, even highly solvable ones, people often do vastly less. Let us take this seriously, and carefully choose what inconveniences to put where. Let us also take seriously that when AI or othe…

There's this popular trope in fiction about a character being mind controlled without losing awareness of what's happening. Think Jessica Jones, The Manchurian Candidate or Bioshock. The villain uses some magical technology to take control of your brain - but only the part of your brain that's responsible for motor control. You remain conscious and…

This research was conducted at AE Studio and supported by the AI Safety Grants programme administered by Foresight Institute with additional support from AE Studio. Summary In this post, we summarise the main experimental results from our new paper, "Towards Safe and Honest AI Agents with Neural Self-Other Overlap", which we presented orally at the…

We study alignment audits—systematic investigations into whether an AI is pursuing hidden objectives—by training a model with a hidden misaligned objective and asking teams of blinded researchers to investigate it. This paper was a collaboration between the Anthropic Alignment Science and Interpretability teams. Abstract We study the feasibility of…

The Most Forbidden Technique is training an AI using interpretability techniques. An AI produces a final output [X] via some method [M]. You can analyze [M] using technique [T], to learn what the AI is up to. You could train on that. Never do that. You train on [X]. Only [X]. Never [M], never [T]. Why? Because [T] is how you figure out when the mod…

You learn the rules as soon as you’re old enough to speak. Don’t talk to jabberjays. You recite them as soon as you wake up every morning. Keep your eyes off screensnakes. Your mother chooses a dozen to quiz you on each day before you’re allowed lunch. Glitchers aren’t human any more; if you see one, run. Before you sleep, you run through the whole…

Exciting Update: OpenAI has released this blog post and paper which makes me very happy. It's basically the first steps along the research agenda I sketched out here. tl;dr: 1.) They notice that their flagship reasoning models do sometimes intentionally reward hack, e.g. literally say "Let's hack" in the CoT and then proceed to hack the evaluation …