LessWrong posts by zvi

Is generative AI making it harder for young people to find jobs? My answer is: Yes, definitely, in terms of for any given job that exists finding the job and getting hired. That's getting harder. AI is most definitely screwing up that process. Yes, probably, in terms of employment in automation-impacted sectors. It always seemed odd to think otherwise, and this week's new study has strong evidence...

In the wake of the confusions around GPT-5, this week had yet another round of claims that AI wasn’t progressing, or AI isn’t or won’t create much value, and so on. There were reports that one study in particular impacted Wall Street, and as you would expect it was not a great study. Situational awareness is not what you’d hope. I’ve gathered related coverage here, to get it out of the way before...

I happily admit I am deeply confused about consciousness. I don’t feel confident I understand what it is, what causes it, which entities have it, what future entities might have it, to what extent it matters and why, or what we should do about these questions. This applies both in terms of finding the answers and what to do once we find them, including the implications for how worried we should be...

What if DeepSeek released a model claiming 66 on SWE and almost no one tried using it? Would it be any good? Would you be able to tell? Or would we get the shortest post of the year? Why We Haven’t Seen v4 or r2 Why are we settling for v3.1 and have yet to see DeepSeek release v4 or r2 yet? Eleanor Olcott and Zijing Wu: Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek delayed the release of its ne...

One potentially big event was that DeepSeek came out with v3.1. Initial response was very quiet, but this is DeepSeek and there are some strong scores especially on SWE and people may need time to process the release. So I’m postponing my coverage of this to give us time to learn more. Meta is restructuring its AI operations, including a hiring freeze. Some see this as some sign of an AI pullback....

The conditions are: Lol, we’re Meta. Or lol we’re xAI. This expands upon many previous discussions, including the AI Companion Piece. Lol We’re Meta I said that ‘Lol we’re Meta’ was their alignment plan. It turns out their alignment plan was substantially better or worse (depending on your point of view) than that, in that they also wrote down 200 pages of details of exactly how much lol there wou...

I got suckered into paying attention to multiple non-AI political stories this month: The shooting of the messenger, in violation of the most sacred principles, via firing the head of the USA's Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Online Safety Bill in the UK. As a reminder, feel no obligation whatsoever to engage with either of these. There are tons of other things worth paying attention to that a...

Everyone agrees that the release of GPT-5 was botched. Everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT-4o and o3 to GPT-5 was not of similar size to the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4, that it was not the direct quantum leap we were hoping for, and that the release was overhyped quite a bit. GPT-5 still represented the release of at least three distinct models: GPT-5-Fast, GPT-5-Thinking and GPT-5...

In honor of Nate Silver's analysis of when to leave for the airport, and because it's been an intense week, I thought I’d offer my thoughts on various related questions. Buying The Ticket As far as I can tell, the major booking portals for tickets are all basically the same. I’ve been using Orbitz for a long time because I’m used to the interface, it is clean and I have confidence it works. The ti...

What do I ultimately make of all the new versions of GPT-5? The practical offerings and how they interact continues to change by the day. I expect more to come. It will take a while for things to settle down. I’ll start with the central takeaways and how I select models right now, then go through the type and various questions in detail. Table of Contents Central Takeaways. Choose Your Fighter. Of...

A key problem with having and interpreting reactions to GPT-5 is that it is often unclear whether the reaction is to GPT-5, GPT-5-Router or GPT-5-Thinking. Another is that many of the things people are reacting to changed rapidly after release, such as rate limits, the effectiveness of the model selection router and alternative options, and the availability of GPT-4o. This complicates the traditio...

GPT-5 was a long time coming. Is it a good model, sir? Yes. In practice it is a good, but not great, model. Or rather, it is several good models released at once: GPT-5, GPT-5-Thinking, GPT-5-With-The-Router, GPT-5-Pro, GPT-5-API. That leads to a lot of confusion. What is most good? Cutting down on errors and hallucinations is a big deal. Ease of use and ‘just doing things’ have improved. Early re...

That's on OpenAI. I don’t schedule their product releases. Since it takes several days to gather my reports on new models, we are doing our coverage of the OpenAI open weights models, GPT-OSS-20b and GPT-OSS-120b, today, after the release of GPT-5. The bottom line is that they seem like clearly good models in their targeted reasoning domains. There are many reports of them struggling in other doma...

Brace for impact. We are presumably (checks watch) four hours from GPT-5. That's the time you need to catch up on all the other AI news. In another week, I might have done an entire post on Gemini 2.5 Deep Thinking, or Genie 3, or a few other things. This week? Quickly, there's no time. OpenAI has already released an open model. I’m aiming to cover that tomorrow. Table of Contents Also: Claude 4.1...

Claude Opus 4 has been updated to Claude Opus 4.1. This is a correctly named incremental update, with the bigger news being ‘we plan to release substantially larger improvements to our models in the coming weeks.’ It is still worth noting if you code, as there are many indications this is a larger practical jump in performance than one might think. We also got a change to the Claude.ai system prom...

There's a time and a place for everything. It used to be called college. Table of Contents The Big Test. Testing, Testing. Legalized Cheating On the Big Test. What Happens When You Don’t Test For Academics. What Happens Without Academic Standards. Another Academic Standard Perhaps. RIP Columbia Core Curriculum and Also Social Theory. College Tuition and Costs. Negotiation. Skipping College. Respec...

Sam Altman talked recently to Theo Von. Double click to interact with video Theo is genuinely engaging and curious throughout. This made me want to consider listening to his podcast more. I’d love to hang. He seems like a great dude. The problem is that his curiosity has been redirected away from the places it would matter most – the Altman strategy of acting as if the biggest concerns, risks and...

There was enough governance related news this week to spin it out. The EU AI Code of Practice Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Mistral, Aleph Alpha, Cohere and others commit to signing the EU AI Code of Practice. Google has now signed. Microsoft says it is likely to sign. xAI signed the AI safety chapter of the code, but is refusing to sign the others, citing them as overreach especially as pertains to...

Due to Continued Claude Code Complications, we can report Unlimited Usage Ultimately Unsustainable. May I suggest using the API, where Anthropic's yearly revenue is now projected to rise to $9 billion? The biggest news items this week were in the policy realm, with the EU AI Code of Practice and the release of America's AI Action Plan and a Chinese response. I am spinning off the policy realm into...

Table of Contents College Applications. The College Application Essay (Is) From Hell. Don’t Guess The Teacher's Password, Ask For It Explicitly. A Dime a Dozen. Treat Admissions Essays Like Games of Balderdash. It's About To Get Worse. Alternative Systems Need Good Design. The SAT Scale Is Broken On Purpose. College Applications In case you missed it, yes, of course Harvard admissions are way up a...

The Tea app is or at least was on fire, rapidly gaining lots of users. This opens up two discussions, one on the game theory and dynamics of Tea, one on its abysmal security. It's a little too on the nose that a hot new app that purports to exist so that women can anonymously seek out and spill the tea on men, which then puts user information into an unprotected dropbox thus spilling the tea on th...

AI companions, other forms of personalized AI content and persuasion and related issues continue to be a hot topic. What do people use companions for? Are we headed for a goonpocalypse? Mostly no, companions are used mostly not used for romantic relationships or erotica, although perhaps that could change. How worried should we be about personalization maximized for persuasion or engagement? Table...

No, seriously. If you look at the substance, it's pretty good. I’ll go over the whole thing in detail, including the three executive actions implementing some of the provisions. Then as a postscript I’ll cover other reactions. The White House Issues a Pretty Good AI Action Plan There is a lot of the kind of rhetoric you would expect from a Trump White House. Where it does not bear directly on the...

The big AI news this week came on many fronts. Google and OpenAI unexpectedly got 2025 IMO Gold using LLMs under test conditions, rather than a tool like AlphaProof. How they achieved this was a big deal in terms of expectations for future capabilities. ChatGPT released GPT Agent, a substantial improvement on Operator that makes it viable on a broader range of tasks. For now I continue to struggle...

OpenAI now offers 400 shots of ‘agent mode’ per month to Pro subscribers. This incorporates and builds upon OpenAI's Operator. Does that give us much progress? Can it do the thing on a level that makes it useful? So far, it does seem like a substantial upgrade, but we still don’t see much to do with it. What Is The Thing? Greg Brockman (OpenAI): When we founded OpenAI (10 years ago!!), one of our...