LessWrong posts by zvi

Claude Sonnet 4.5 was released yesterday. Anthropic credibly describes it as the best coding, agentic and computer use model in the world. At least while I learn more, I am defaulting to it as my new primary model for queries short of GPT-5-Pro level. I’ll cover the system card and alignment concerns first, then cover capabilities and reactions tomorrow once everyone has had another day to play wi...

This seems like a good opportunity to do some of my classic detailed podcast coverage. The conventions are: This is not complete, points I did not find of note are skipped. The main part of each point is descriptive of what is said, by default paraphrased. For direct quotes I will use quote marks, by default this is Sutton. Nested statements are my own commentary. Timestamps are approximate and fr...

I obviously cover many economical things in the ordinary course of business, but I try to reserve the sufficiently out of place or in the weeds stuff that is not time sensitive for updates like this one. Trade is Bad Good We love trade now, so maybe it’ll all turn out great? John Burn-Murdoch: Negative partisanship is a helluva drug: Up until a few months ago, liberal and conservative Americans he...

OpenAI is here this week to show us the money, as in a $100 billion investment from Nvidia and operationalization of a $400 billion buildout for Stargate. They are not kidding around when it comes to scale. They’re going to need it, as they are announcing soon a slate of products that takes inference costs to the next level. After a full review and two reaction posts, I’ve now completed my primary...

They also show us the chips, and the data centers. It is quite a large amount of money, and chips, and some very large data centers. Nvidia Invests Up To $100 Billion In OpenAI Nvidia to invest ‘as much as’ $100 billion (in cash) into OpenAI to support new data centers, with $10 billion in the first stage, on the heels of investing $5 billion into Intel. Ian King and Shirin Ghaffary (Bloomberg): A...

Previously I shared various reactions to If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, along with my own highly positive review. Reactions continued to pour in, including several impactful ones. There's more. Any further reactions will have a higher bar, and be included in weekly posts unless one is very high quality and raises important new arguments. Sales Look Good IABIED gets to #8 in Apple Books nonfict...

The Trump Administration is attempting to put a $100k fee on future H1-B applications, including those that are exempt from the lottery and cap, unless of course they choose to waive it for you. I say attempting because Trump's legal ability to do this appears dubious. This post mostly covers the question of whether this is a reasonable policy poorly implemented, or a terrible policy poorly implem...

Where ‘it’ is superintelligence, an AI smarter and more capable than humans. And where ‘everyone dies’ means that everyone dies. No, seriously. They’re not kidding. They mean this very literally. To be precise, they mean that ‘If anyone builds [superintelligence] [under anything like present conditions using anything close to current techniques] then everyone dies.’ My position on this is to add a...

It is book week. As in the new book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Sores, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Yesterday I gathered various people's reviews together. Going home from the airport, I saw an ad for it riding the subway. Tomorrow, I’ll post my full review, which goes over the book extensively, and which subscribers got in their inboxes last week. The rest of the AI world cooperated by n...

No, Seriously, If Anyone Builds It, [Probably] Everyone Dies My very positive full review was briefly accidentally posted and emailed out last Friday, whereas the intention was to offer it this Friday, on the 19th. I’ll be posting it again then. If you’re going to read the book, which I recommend that you do, you should read the book first, and the reviews later, especially mine since it goes into...

As in, cases of AI driving people crazy, or reinforcing their craziness. Alas, I expect this to become an ongoing series worthy of its own posts. Say It Isn’t So In case an LLM assisted in and validated your scientific breakthrough, Egg Syntax is here with the bad news that your discovery probably isn’t real. At minimum, first have another LLM critique the breakthrough without giving away that it...

All the news that's fit to print, but has nowhere to go. Important Rules Reminder This important rule is a special case of an even more important rule: Dirty Hexas Hedge: One of the old unwritten WASP rules of civilization maintenance we’ve lost is: when someone behaves insincerely for the sake of maintaining proper decorum, you respond by respecting the commitment to decorum rather than calling o...

Where ‘it’ is superintelligence, an AI smarter and more capable than humans. And where ‘everyone dies’ means that everyone dies. No, seriously. They’re not kidding. They mean this very literally. To be precise, they mean that ‘If anyone builds [superintelligence] [under anything like present conditions using anything close to current techniques] then everyone dies.’ My position on this is to add a...

It doesn’t look good, on many fronts, especially taking a stake in Intel. We continue. Table of Contents America Extorts 10% of Intel. Nice company you got there. Who's next? The Quest For No Regulations Whatsoever. a16z is at it again, Brockman joins. The Quest for Sane Regulations. Dean Ball surveys the state legislative landscape. Chip City. Nvidia beats earnings, Huawei plans to triple chip pr...

Even in quiet weeks like this one, there are noticeable incremental upgrades. The cost of the best video generation tool, Veo 3, went down by half. ChatGPT now offers conversation branching. Claude can directly edit files. Yet it is a good time to ask about the missing results. Where are all the AI agents? If AI coding is so good why aren’t we seeing a surge in GitHub repositories or iPhone apps?...

The purported main purpose of school, and even of childhood, is educating children. Many people are actively opposed to this idea. Either they have other priorities that matter more, or sometimes they outright think that your child learning things is bad and you should feel bad for wanting that. Some even say it openly. They actively and openly want to stop your child from learning things, and wan...

That does not mean AI will successfully make it all the way to AGI and superintelligence, or that it will make it there soon or on any given time frame. It does mean that AI progress, while it could easily have been even faster, has still been historically lightning fast. It has exceeded almost all expectations from more than a few years ago. And it means we cannot disregard the possibility of Hig...

I am a little late to the party on several key developments at OpenAI: OpenAI's Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane was central to the creation of the new $100 million PAC where they will partner with a16z to oppose any and all attempts of states to regulate AI in any way for any reason. Effectively as part of that effort, OpenAI sent a deeply bad faith letter to Governor Newsom opposing SB...

It's rough out there. Have we tried engaging in less active sabotage? No? Carry on. Table of Contents Quiet Speculations. What will become the new differentiators? The Quest for Sane Regulations. Bostrom proposes improving on status quo a bit. The Quest For No Regulations. Cato Institute CEO says Cato Institute things. But This Time You’ve Gone Too Far. You’re drawing the line where? Really? Chip...

One result of going on vacation was that I wasn’t able to spin events off into focused posts this week, so I’m going to fall back on splitting the weekly instead, plus some reserving a few subtopics for later posts, including AI craziness (the Tim Hua post on this is excellent), some new OpenAI largely policy-related shenanigans, and the continuing craziness of some people who should very much kno...

Startup Roundups (#1, #2) look like they’re settling in as an annual tradition. I’ve been catching up on queued roundups this week as the family was on vacation. I am back now but the weekly may be pushed to Friday as I dig out from the backlog. The Central Themes There is a common theme to the vignettes offered across the years. The central perspective has not much changed. I would summarize the...

Traffic and transit are finally getting a roundup all their own. I’ll start out with various victory laps on the awesomeness that is New York City Congestion pricing, which should hopefully now be a settled matter, then do a survey of everything else. New York City Congestion Pricing Redux We spent years fighting to get congestion pricing passed in New York City. Once it was in place, everyone saw...

There's quite a lot in the queue since last time, so this is the first large chunk of it, which focuses on apps and otherwise finding an initial connection, and some things that directly impact that. Table of Contents You’re Single Because You Have No Friends To Date. You’re Single Because You Aren’t Willing To Be Dungeon Master. You’re Single Because You Didn’t Listen To My Friend's Podcast. You’...

It doesn’t look good, on many fronts, especially taking a stake in Intel. We continue. Table of Contents America Extorts 10% of Intel. Nice company you got there. Who's next? The Quest For No Regulations Whatsoever. a16z is at it again, Brockman joins. The Quest for Sane Regulations. Dean Ball surveys the state legislative landscape. Chip City. Nvidia beats earnings, Huawei plans to triple chip pr...

Once again we’ve reached the point where the weekly update needs to be split in two. Thus, the alignment and policy coverage will happen tomorrow. Today covers the rest. The secret big announcement this week was Claude for Chrome. This is a huge deal. It will be rolling out slowly. When I have access or otherwise know more, so will you. The obvious big announcement was Gemini Flash 2.5 Image. Ever...