LessWrong posts by zvi

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. Normally I keep everything to number...

Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was very clearly 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. What are the main takea...

OpenAI is back with a new Codex model, released the same day as Claude Opus 4.6. The headline pitch is it combines the coding skills of GPT-5.2-Codex with the general knowledge and skills of other models, along with extra speed and improvements in the Codex harness, so that it can now handle your full stack agentic needs. We also got the Codex app for Mac, which is getting positive reactions, and...

Life comes at you increasingly fast. Two months after Claude Opus 4.5 we get a substantial upgrade in Claude Opus 4.6. The same day, we got GPT-5.3-Codex. That used to be something we’d call remarkably fast. It's probably the new normal, until things get even faster than that. Welcome to recursive self-improvement. Before those releases, I was using Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Code for essentially...

Coverage of Claude Opus 4.6 started yesterday with the mundane alignment and model welfare sections of the model card. Today covers the kinds of safety I think matter most: Sabotage, deception, situational awareness, outside red teaming and most importantly the frontier, catastrophic and existential risks. I think it was correct to release Opus 4.6 as an ASL-3 model, but the process Anthropic uses...

Claude Opus 4.6 is here. It was built with and mostly evaluated by Claude. Their headline pitch includes: 1M token context window (in beta) with State of the art retrieval performance. Improved abilities on a range of everyday work tasks. Model is improved. State of the art on some evaluations, including Terminal-Bench 2.0, HLE and a very strong lead in GDPval-AA. Claude Code now has an experiment...

Claude Opus 4.6 and agent swarms were announced yesterday. That's some big upgrades for Claude Code. OpenAI, the competition, offered us GPT-5.3-Codex, and this week gave us an app form of Codex that already has a million active users. That's all very exciting, and next week is going to be about covering that. This post is about all the cool things that happened before that, which we will be build...

Remember OpenClaw and Moltbook? One might say they already seem a little quaint. So earlier-this-week. That's the internet having an absurdly short attention span, rather than those events not being important. They were definitely important. They were also early. It is not quite time for AI social networks or fully unleashed autonomous AI agents. The security issues have not been sorted out, and r...

I had to delay this a little bit, but the results are in and Kimi K2.5 is pretty good. Table of Contents Official Introduction. On Your Marks. Positive Reactions. Skeptical Reactions. Kimi Product Accounts. Agent Swarm. Who Are You? Export Controls Are Working. Where Are You Going? Safety Not Even Third. It's A Good Model, Sir. Official Introduction Introducing Kimi K2.5, Kimi.ai: Meet Kimi K2.5,...

First we must covered Moltbook. Now we can double back and cover OpenClaw. Do you want a generally impowered, initiative-taking AI agent that has access to your various accounts and communicates and does things on your behalf? That depends on how well, safely, reliably and cheaply it works. It's not ready for prime time, especially on the safety side. That may not last for long. It's definitely re...

Moltbook is a public social network for AI agents modeled after Reddit. It was named after a new agent framework that was briefly called Moltbot, was originally Clawdbot and is now OpenClaw. I’ll double back to cover the framework soon. Scott Alexander wrote two extended tours of things going on there. If you want a tour of ‘what types of things you can see in Moltbook’ this is the place to go, I...

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is back with another extended essay, The Adolescence of Technology. This is the follow up to his previous essay Machines of Loving Grace. In MoLG, Dario talked about some of the upsides of AI. Here he talks about the dangers, and the need to minimize them while maximizing the benefits. In many aspects this was a good essay. Overall it is a mild positive update on Anthrop...

This was Anthropic Vision week where at DWATV, which caused things to fall a bit behind on other fronts even within AI. Several topics are getting pushed forward, as the Christmas lull appears to be over. Upcoming schedule: Friday will cover Dario's essay The Adolescence of Technology. Monday will cover Kimi K2.5, which is potentially a big deal. Tuesday is scheduled to be Claude Code #4. I’ve als...

The first post in this series looked at the structure of Claude's Constitution. The second post in this series looked at its ethical framework. This final post deals with conflicts and open problems, starting with the first question one asks about any constitution. How and when will it be amended? There are also several specific questions. How do you address claims of authority, jailbreaks and pro...

This is the second part of my three part series on the Claude Constitution. Part one outlined the structure of the Constitution. Part two, this post, covers the virtue ethics framework that is at the center of it all, and why this is a wise approach. Part three will cover particular areas of conflict and potential improvement. One note on part 1 is that various people replied to point out that whe...

Claude's Constitution is an extraordinary document, and will be this week's focus. Its aim is nothing less than helping humanity transition to a world of powerful AI (also known variously as AGI, transformative AI, superintelligence or my current name of choice ‘sufficiently advanced AI.’ The constitution is written with Claude in mind, although it is highly readable for humans, and would serve as...

If there's several things this blog endorses, one of them would be going meta. It's time. The big picture awaits. You’re Single Because You Live In The Wrong Place The most important meta question is location, location, location. This is the periodic reminder that dating dynamics are very different in different locations, and gender ratios are far more uneven than they appear because a lot of peop...

Anthropic released a new constitution for Claude. I encourage those interested to read the document, either in whole or in part. I intend to cover it on its own soon. There was also actual talk about coordinating on a conditional pause or slowdown from both DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, which I also plan to cover later. Claude Code continues to be the talk of the town...

We’re back with all the Claude that's fit to Code. I continue to have great fun with it and find useful upgrades, but the biggest reminder is that you need the art to have an end other than itself. Don’t spend too long improving your setup, or especially improving how you improve your setup, without actually working on useful things. The Efficient Market Hypothesis Odd Lots covered Claude Code. Fu...

A short fun one today, so we have a reference point for this later. This post was going around my parts of Twitter: @gmltony: Go to your ChatGPT and send this prompt: “Create an image of how I treat you”. Share your image result. That's not a great sign. The good news is that typically things look a lot better, and ChatGPT has a consistent handful of characters portraying itself in these friendlie...

The main thing to know this time around is that the whole crazy ‘what is causing the rise in autism?’ debacle is over actual nothing. There is no rise in autism. There is only a rise in the diagnosis of autism. Table of Contents Autism Speaks. Exercise Is Awesome. That's Peanuts. An Age Of Wonders. GLP-1s In Particular. The Superheroes. The Supervillains. FDA Delenda Est. Hansonian Medicine. Hospi...

Good news, we managed to make some cuts. I think? Table of Contents California In Crisis. Bad News. Opportunity Knocks. Government Working. The Efficient Market Hypothesis Has Thoughts. No All That Money Doesn’t Go To Pay Interest. While I Cannot Condone This. Burnout. Good News, Everyone. Good Advice. For Your Entertainment. Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game. Sports Go Sports. Antisocial Medi...

Claude Code and Cowork are growing so much that it is overwhelming Anthropic's servers. Claude Code and Cowork news has for weeks now been a large portion of newsworthy items about AI. Thus, at least for now, all things Claude Code and Cowork will stop appearing in the weekly updates, and will get their own updates, which might even be weekly. Google offered us the new Universal Commerce Protocol,...

And once they take our jobs, will we be able to find new ones? Will AI take those too? Seb Krier recently wrote an unusually good take on that, which will center this post. I believe that Seb is being too optimistic on several fronts, but in a considered and highly reasonable way. The key is to understand the assumptions being made, and also to understand that he is only predicting that the era of...

Claude Code does a lot more than code, but the name and command line scare people. Anthropic realized a rebrand was in order. Two weeks later, we have Claude Cowork, written entirely by Claude Code. Did you know that chat interfaces were always (mostly) secretly a command line? This is still very much a research preview, available only for Claude Max users on Macs with a bunch of bugs and missing...