LessWrong posts by zvi

We all need a break so: What is the most important chart in the world? I decided to ask Twitter, and got a lot of good answers. So today, with few of my picks, I present: The Most Important Charts In The World. You’ve got to admit it's getting better. Better all the time. Mostly. The Original Most Important Chart The context for this is the METR graph, which is often given that label, where the x-...

The system card for GPT-5.5 mostly told us what we expected. See this thread from Drake Thomas for some comparisons to Anthropic's model card for Opus 4.7. Now we move on to asking what it means in practice, and in what situations GPT-5.5 should become our new weapon of choice. My answer is for some purposes yes, and for others no, but it is now competitive. GPT-5.5 is like GPT-5.4, only more so,...

Last week, OpenAI announced GPT-5.5, including GPT-5.5-Pro. My overall read here is that GPT-5.5 is a solid improvement, and for many purposes GPT-5.5 is competitive with Claude Opus. Reactions are still coming in and it is early. My guess on the shape is that GPT-5.5 is the pick for ‘just the facts’ queries, web searches or straightforward well-specified requests, and Claude Opus 4.7 is the choic...

AI continue to accelerate and dominate the schedule, which is why this is a bit late, but we do occasionally need to pay our respects to the Goddess of Everything Else. There's cool or interesting things everywhere. Also maddenning things. But did you hear, for example, that they’re making some exceptions to the Jones Act? Table of Contents Bad News. Good Advice. Opportunity Knocks. Who Judges The...

This was the week of Claude Opus 4.7. The reception was more mixed than usual. It clearly has the intelligence and chops, especially for coding tasks, and a lot of people including myself are happy to switch over to it as our daily driver. But others don’t like its personality, or its reluctance to follow instructions or to suffer fools and assholes, or the requirement to use adaptive thinking, an...

It is thanks to Anthropic that we get to have this discussion in the first place. Only they, among the labs, take the problem seriously enough to attempt to address these problems at all. They are also the ones that make the models that matter most. So the people who care about model welfare get mad at Anthropic quite a lot. I too am going to be harsh on Anthropic here. It seems likely things went...

Claude Opus 4.7 raises a lot of key model welfare related concerns. I was planning to do model welfare first, but I’m having some good conversations about that post and it needs another day to cook, and also it might benefit from this post going first. So I’m going to do a swap. Yesterday we covered the model card. Today we do capabilities. Then tomorrow we’ll aim to address model welfare and rela...

Less than a week after completing coverage of Claude Mythos, here we are again as Anthropic gives us Claude Opus 4.7. So here we are, with another 232 pages of light reading. This post covers the first six sections of the Model Card. It excludes section seven, model welfare, because there are concerns this time around that need to be expanded into their own post. The reason model welfare and relat...

This is a day late because, given the discourse around Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Jensen Huang, I pushed the weekly to Friday. This week's coverage focused on the most important model in a while, Claude Mythos, which was a large jump in cybersecurity capabilities, especially in its ability to autonomously assemble complex exploits of even the world's most important software. As a result, Myth...

Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was one of those. So here we go. As usual for podcast posts, the baseline bullet points describe key points made, and then the nested statements are my commentary. Some points are dropped. If I am quoting directly I use quote marks, otherwise assume paraphrases. As with the last podcast I covered,...

As we all try to figure out what Mythos means for us down the line, the world of practical agentic coding continues, with the latest array of upgrades. The biggest change, which I’m finally covering, is Auto Mode. Auto Mode is the famously requested kinda-dangerously-skip-some-permissions, where the system keeps an eye on all the commands to ensure human approval for anything too dangerous. It is...

To round out coverage of Mythos, today covers capabilities other than cyber, and anything else additional not covered by the first two posts, including new reactions and details. Post one covered the model card, post two covered cybersecurity. There really is a lot to get through. Understanding AI had an additional writeup of Project Glasswing I missed last time. I liked the metaphor of Opus as a...

Nor is the threat or implication of violence. Period. Ever. No exceptions. It is completely unacceptable. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms. It is immoral, and also it is ineffective. It would be immoral even if it were effective. Nothing hurts your cause more. Do not do this, and do not tolerate anyone who does. The reason I need to say this now is that there has been at least one atte...

Anthropic is not going to release its new most capable model, Claude Mythos, to the public any time soon. Its cyber capabilities are too dangerous to make broadly available until our most important software is in a much stronger state and there are no plans to release Mythos widely. They are instead going to do a limited release to key cybersecurity partners, in order to use it to patch as many vu...

Claude Mythos is different. This is the first model other than GPT-2 that is at first not being released for public use at all. With GPT-2 the delay was due to a general precautionary principle. OpenAI did not know what they had, or what effect on demand text would have on various systems. It sounds funny now, GPT-2 was harmless, but at the time the concern was highly reasonable. The decision not...

There exists an AI model, Claude Mythos, that has discovered critical safety vulnerabilities in every major operating system and browser. If released today it would likely break the internet and be chaos. If they had wanted to, they could have used it themselves and owned pretty much everyone. Luckily for all of us, Anthropic did no such thing. Instead, Anthropic is launching Project Glasswing, an...

The real news today is that Anthropic has partnered with the top companies in cybersecurity to try and patch everyone's systems to fix all the thousands of zero-day exploits found by their new model Claude Mythos. I’ll be sorting through that over the coming days. For now, we instead have stories from OpenAI. In particular there are three stories. There's a massive 18,000 word article in The New Y...

Build more housing where people want to live. The rest is commentary. If there is enough housing, it will be affordable, people will afford more house, and people will be able to live where they want to live. It's always been that simple. Increased supply of any kind of housing increases affordability of all kinds of housing. Are there other things that would also be helpful? Yes, but they’re comm...

Wednesday's post talked about the implications of Anthropic changing from v2.2 to v3.0 of its RSP, including that this broke promises that many people relied upon when making important decisions. Today's post treats the new RSP v3.0 as a new document, and evaluates it. First I’ll go over how the RSP v3.0 works at a high level. Then I’ll dive into the Roadmap and the Risk Report. How RSP v3.0 Works...

Anthropic had some problem with leaks this week. We learned that they are sitting on a new larger-than-Opus AI model, Mythos, that they believe offers a step change in cyber capabilities. We also got a full leak of the source for Claude Code. Oh, and Axios was compromised, on the heels of LiteLLM. This looks to be getting a lot more common. Defense beats offense in most cases, but offense is getti...

Anthropic has revised its Responsible Scaling Policy to v3. The changes involved include abandoning many previous commitments, including one not to move ahead if doing so would be dangerous, citing that given competition they feel blindly following such a principle would not make the world safer. Holden Karnofsky advocated for the changes. He maintains that the previous strategy of specific commit...

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a brilliant piece of work. (This will be a fully spoilorific overview. If you haven’t seen The AI Doc,I recommend seeing it, it is about as good as it could realistically have been, in most ways.) Like many things, it only works because it is centrally real. The creator of the documentary clearly did get married and have a child, freak out about AI,...

AI discorce. AI discorce never changes. That's not actually true. But it is true to a rather frustrating degree, for those of us who need to be in the thick of it all the time. It is especially true if someone says the word ‘pause,’ whether or not they would actually support one. Play it again, Sam. Meanwhile, you know what changes a lot? Actual AI capabilities. Also, war. In any case, here's the...

Last night, Anthropic was given its preliminary injunction, with a stay of seven days. Emil Michael is a very angry person right now. So is the Honorable Judge Lin. We were worried we would draw a judge that had no idea how any of this worked and would give the government absurd deference or buy into nonsense arguments. That is not how it played out. Judge Lin very much understood the issues in pl...

The major technical advances this week were in agentic coding, as covered yesterday. The major non-DoW political and alignment developments will be covered tomorrow. The DoW vs. Anthropic trial continues. Judge Lin was very not happy with the government's case, which makes sense since the government has no case and was arguing a variety of Obvious Nonsense. The question now is how much preliminary...