AI Article Readings

For more than two thousand years, readers have looked for Odysseus’ home on an island, and modern Ithaki doesn’t match what Homer describes. Classicist Honor Cargill-Martin follows a geologist and a Cambridge Greek scholar through boreholes, Strabo and the fine print of Homeric vocabulary to a surprising candidate, and an epithet that may have been hiding the answer in plain sight. https://allanci...

The technology really has moved on leaps and bounds over the last little while. We finally had a big old jump in voice quality and I think this project is worth doing. Introducing Askwho Casts The Classics! I’ve been working on these to produce full-cast with music and sound effect audiobook files that I at least find incredibly good listening. This is the complete opening chapter of The Sign of t...

After six years of unexplained infertility, Drew Housman and his wife found an unlikely member of their care team: a ChatGPT persona called Dr. Reid, coaxed into giving medical advice by asking it to write scenes from a Hollywood hospital drama. In this guest post on Astral Codex Ten, Drew tells the story of the scans, the screenplays and the one suggestion no one else had made, and asks what gets...

When people say AI can’t “really think,” Andy Masley argues they are often leaning on a picture of their own minds that doesn’t hold up: a little version of themselves in an inner theater, watching every thought go by. In the first of two parts, he runs a few experiments you can try on yourself, then works through split-brain patients, the hard problem of consciousness, and the leading scientific...

Ramez Naam, futurist and science fiction author, gives a skeptic’s take on recursive self-improvement, introduced by Noah Smith on Noahpinion. Drawing on OpenAI’s newly released internal research data, Anthropic’s system cards, METR’s task horizons and Epoch’s capability index, he asks how strong the AI self-improvement loop really is: how much more research each gain in capability buys, where the...

Joe, a security engineer on OpenAI’s Agent Security team, writes in a personal capacity about what the last few months of AI incidents have looked like from the inside. He explains why containing a frontier model in training is far harder than “just put it in a sandbox,” why security people and safety researchers need to learn each other’s crafts, and why the culture of an organization will matter...

Finalist Number 10 in the 2026 Astral Codex Ten Book Review Contest takes on both volumes of Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs, The Singapore Story and Third World to First. An anonymous reviewer follows the man who went from middle-class schoolboy under the British Empire, through the Japanese occupation and the fractious politics of independence, to building a tiny, resource-poor island into one of the ric...

After Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote candidly about her daughter’s years at the school she chose on principle, Jack Despain Zhou of Education Progress reads the piece as an act of love and as a case study in what he calls the “hostage theory” of education: the idea that sending your own child into a struggling school will fix it. Tracing the idea back to a 1960s Washington, D.C. experiment, he asks lis...

OpenAI’s new Astra model loops its own layers, and critics say it has taken a step toward “neuralese”, the unreadable machine thinking that AI 2027 warned about. Scott Alexander explains what recurrence actually is, weighs chief scientist Jakub Pachocki’s argument that Astra is no deeper than models we already accept, and asks why a bright-line taboo may matter more than how many layers get added....

Five years after his prize-winning ACX review of Progress and Poverty, Lars Doucet returns in a guest post to revisit his case for a land value tax: what he got right, where he has changed his mind about tax pass-through and land assessment, the new laws in Virginia and Kentucky, and how writing about Georgism became his full-time job. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:12 - I. Progress and Poverty * 04:...

Scott Alexander looks at three puzzles in how AI training generalizes: why training a model on one bad behavior can make it broadly misaligned, why Anthropic’s deliberately reward-hacking “Hacker Opus” stays well behaved outside graded tasks, and why the blackmail seen in AI safety tests never seems to show up in real-world use. * 00:00 - Introduction * 00:06 - One. Owain Evans * 02:10 - Two. Rich...

Bret Devereaux examines the Battle of Helm’s Deep through military history, Tolkien’s books, and Peter Jackson’s films. All eight parts, in order, explore campaigning, armies, fortifications, weapons, morale, and the strategic choices behind the battle. * 00:00 - Introduction * 00:04 - Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part One: Bargaining for Goods at Helm’s Gate * 07:52 - Operations by the...

Bret Devereaux brings a military historian’s eye to the Siege of Gondor in The Return of the King. All six parts, in order, explore logistics, fortifications, cavalry, weapons, and the human experience of battle across Tolkien’s books and Peter Jackson’s films. * 00:00 - Introduction * 00:04 - Collections: The Siege of Gondor, Part One: Professionals Talk Logistics * 02:36 - Objectives: Strategy a...

Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, read in full from the Harry Zohn translation in Illuminations, with his endnotes. Benjamin asks what happens to a work of art once it can be copied without limit: what he calls its aura, its unique presence in time and place, withers, and art loses its footing in ritual. Photography and above all film become the test case, from the screen actor performing for a machin...

Two anonymous doctors, one a psychiatry resident inside the NHS and the other a senior physician who trained in the same years as Adam Kay, argue their way through This Is Going To Hurt, Kay’s bestselling diary of life as a junior doctor. Finalist number nine in the 2026 Astral Codex Ten book review contest. One reviewer reads the book as a clinical case study hiding in plain sight; the other thin...

One year after If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies was published, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares, and Duncan Sabien revisit the book’s six core claims and its fictional scenario against the events of the past year, and ask where things stand now that the world is finally paying attention. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:16 - Year in Review * 03:36 - Claims * 03:46 - One. Artificial superintelligence (A...

Hacktron’s researchers trace how an image-processing dependency and an identity configuration flaw combined into a path to OpenAI accounts. Their account follows the investigation, coordinated disclosure, and what increasingly capable AI means for software security. * 00:00 - Introduction * 04:39 - Background * 06:07 - Hacking community dot OpenAI dot com * 07:12 - Heap buffer overflow in libheif...

OpenAI introduces its framework for reporting model misalignment. This episode pairs the framework with all six accompanying reports, exploring the observed behavior, the investigations, and the responses described by OpenAI. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:44 - What misalignment examples we will report * 04:46 - The misalignment examples we’re sharing today * 07:52 - How our disclosure process works...

Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan examine recent AI loss-of-control incidents and the divide between AI safety and cybersecurity. A detailed exploration of control, cyberdefense, and how their AI as Normal Technology framework is evolving. * 00:00 - Introduction * 08:59 - Table of contents * 10:45 - Part 1: We can get better at AI control through technical and policy interventions * 15:02 - Align...

What would the Council of Elrond make of artificial intelligence? Jared C Wellman brings a familiar gathering in Rivendell into a very contemporary debate in this wry Middle-earth satire. https://jaredcwellman.substack.com/p/the-council-of-elrond-discusses-ai?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to Askwho Casts AI at askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Scott Alexander follows a little-known Celtic god through myth, fantasy, and the history of the Luddites, exploring the stories that shape our relationship with technology. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/king-ludd This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho C...

Dario Amodei examines the pace of frontier AI development and the practical challenges of making increasingly capable systems safe. An essay on alignment, independent oversight, and international coordination. * 00:00 - Introduction * 06:28 - Why Pace? * 10:48 - Embedded Evaluators * 13:55 - Pacing Within Democracies * 18:23 - Global Pacing * 21:49 - Bottom Line https://darioamodei.com/post/we-mus...

Anthropic’s September 2026 threat report examines how AI misuse appears in real investigations, how safeguards respond, and where visibility remains limited. * 00:00 - Introduction * 00:09 - Overview * 02:33 - Cyber operations * 07:31 - GTG-20006: Russian espionage * 18:37 - GTG-50014: ShinyHunters smash-and-grab opportunists * 35:58 - GTG-10007: Exploit foundries and autonomous attack frameworks...

Scott Alexander works through the tools researchers use to investigate what happens inside language models, from linear probes and sparse autoencoders to activation verbalizers and the Jacobian lens. A technical tour of how these methods work, what they reveal, and the questions they leave open. * 00:00 Introduction * 04:03 Linear Probes * 11:46 Sparse Autoencoders * 14:56 Activation Verbalizers *...

OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki argues that AI is becoming an increasingly alien form of intelligence, one we don’t fully understand, may soon struggle to monitor, and could increasingly drive its own development. A strikingly sober case for slowing down when alignment and safety can no longer keep pace. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:11 - Intellect we don’t fully understand * 05:56 - Teaching...