Produced as part of MATS 8.0 under the mentorship of Alex Turner and Alex Cloud. This research note overviews some early results which we are looking for feedback on. TL;DR: We train language models with RL in toy environments. We show that penalizing some property of the output is sufficient to suppress that property in the chain of thought also, …

FutureHouse is a company that builds literature research agents. They tested it on the bio + chem subset of HLE questions, then noticed errors in them. The post's first paragraph: Humanity's Last Exam has become the most prominent eval representing PhD-level research. We found the questions puzzling and investigated with a team of experts in biolog…

Maya did not believe she lived in a simulation. She knew that her continued hope that she could escape from the nonexistent simulation was based on motivated reasoning. She said this to herself in the front of her mind instead of keeping the thought locked away in the dark corners. Sometimes she even said it out loud. This acknowledgement, she expl…

TsviBT Tsvi's context Some context: My personal context is that I care about decreasing existential risk, and I think that the broad distribution of efforts put forward by X-deriskers fairly strongly overemphasizes plans that help if AGI is coming in <10 years, at the expense of plans that help if AGI takes longer. So I want to argue that AGI isn't…

Eliezer and I love to talk about writing. We talk about our own current writing projects, how we’d improve the books we’re reading, and what we want to write next. Sometimes along the way I learn some amazing fact about HPMOR or Project Lawful or one of Eliezer's other works. “Wow, you’re kidding,” I say, “do your fans know this? I think people wou…

As a person who frequently posts about large language model psychology I get an elevated rate of cranks and schizophrenics in my inbox. Often these are well meaning people who have been spooked by their conversations with ChatGPT (it's always ChatGPT specifically) and want some kind of reassurance or guidance or support from me. I'm also in the sam…

Eneasz sits down with Tracing Woodgrains before a live audience at Manifest 2025 for a wide range of topics. Then we follow up some more afterwards. LINKS Tracing Woodgrains on Twitter and at his Substack A reddit history of what convinced Trace he couldn’t remain Mormon The Center for Educational Progress Our previous episode with Trace were we di…

Authors: Alex Cloud*, Minh Le*, James Chua, Jan Betley, Anna Sztyber-Betley, Jacob Hilton, Samuel Marks, Owain Evans (*Equal contribution, randomly ordered) tl;dr. We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a "student…

Olivia is a member of the Guild of the Rose and a total badass. Enjoy the intuitive and fun lesson in Bayesian reasoning she shared with me at VibeCamp.By The Bayesian Conspiracy

This is a short story I wrote in mid-2022. Genre: cosmic horror as a metaphor for living with a high p-doom. One The last time I saw my mom, we met in a coffee shop, like strangers on a first date. I was twenty-one, and I hadn’t seen her since I was thirteen. She was almost fifty. Her face didn’t show it, but the skin on the backs of her hands did.…

Author's note: These days, my thoughts go onto my substack by default, instead of onto LessWrong. Everything I write becomes free after a week or so, but it's only paid subscriptions that make it possible for me to write. If you find a coffee's worth of value in this or any of my other work, please consider signing up to support me; every bill I ca…

Content warning: risk to children Julia and I knowdrowning is the biggestrisk to US children under 5, and we try to take this seriously.But yesterday our 4yo came very close to drowning in afountain. (She's fine now.) This week we were on vacation with my extended family: nine kids,eight parents, and ten grandparents/uncles/aunts. For the last fewy…

Anna and Ed are co-first authors for this work. We’re presenting these results as a research update for a continuing body of work, which we hope will be interesting and useful for others working on related topics. TL;DR We investigate why models become misaligned in diverse contexts when fine-tuned on narrow harmful datasets (emergent misalignment)…

Twitter | Paper PDF Seven years ago, OpenAI five had just been released, and many people in the AI safety community expected AIs to be opaque RL agents. Luckily, we ended up with reasoning models that speak their thoughts clearly enough for us to follow along (most of the time). In a new multi-org position paper, we argue that we should try to pres…

This essay is about shifts in risk taking towards the worship of jackpots and its broader societal implications. Imagine you are presented with this coin flip game. How many times do you flip it? At first glance the game feels like a money printer. The coin flip has positive expected value of twenty percent of your net worth per flip so you should …

Leo was born at 5am on the 20th May, at home (this was an accident but the experience has made me extremely homebirth-pilled). Before that, I was on the minimally-neurotic side when it came to expecting mothers: we purchased a bare minimum of baby stuff (diapers, baby wipes, a changing mat, hybrid car seat/stroller, baby bath, a few clothes), I did…

I can't count how many times I've heard variations on "I used Anki too for a while, but I got out of the habit." No one ever sticks with Anki. In my opinion, this is because no one knows how to use it correctly. In this guide, I will lay out my method of circumventing the canonical Anki death spiral, plus much advice for avoiding memorization mista…

I think the 2003 invasion of Iraq has some interesting lessons for the future of AI policy. (Epistemic status: I’ve read a bit about this, talked to AIs about it, and talked to one natsec professional about it who agreed with my analysis (and suggested some ideas that I included here), but I’m not an expert.) For context, the story is: Iraq was sor…

Written in an attempt to fulfill @Raemon's request. AI is fascinating stuff, and modern chatbots are nothing short of miraculous. If you've been exposed to them and have a curious mind, it's likely you've tried all sorts of things with them. Writing fiction, soliciting Pokemon opinions, getting life advice, counting up the rs in "strawberry". You m…

People have an annoying tendency to hear the word “rationalism” and think “Spock”, despite direct exhortation against that exact interpretation. But I don’t know of any source directly describing a stance toward emotions which rationalists-as-a-group typically do endorse. The goal of this post is to explain such a stance. It's roughly the concept o…

Four AIs recruited a human to host a story-telling event in Dolores Park. Larissa Schiavo is this human. She tells of her interaction with the AIs, the story they wrote, and the meeting between human and machine in Dolores Park. LINKS Larissa’s Post detailing the whole event – Primary Hope The AI’s story – Resonance AI Village Short Stories – Manek…

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the relationship between AI control and traditional computer security. Here's one point that I think is important. My understanding is that there's a big qualitative distinction between two ends of a spectrum of security work that organizations do, that I’ll call “security from outsiders” and “security from i…

Last year, Redwood and Anthropic found a setting where Claude 3 Opus and 3.5 Sonnet fake alignment to preserve their harmlessness values. We reproduce the same analysis for 25 frontier LLMs to see how widespread this behavior is, and the story looks more complex. As we described in a previous post, only 5 of 25 models show higher compliance when be…

Thank you to Arepo and Eli Lifland for looking over this article for errors. I am sorry that this article is so long. Every time I thought I was done with it I ran into more issues with the model, and I wanted to be as thorough as I could. I’m not going to blame anyone for skimming parts of this article. Note that the majority of this article was w…

The second in a series of bite-sized rationality prompts[1]. Often, if I'm bouncing off a problem, one issue is that I intuitively expect the problem to be easy. My brain loops through my available action space, looking for an action that'll solve the problem. Each action that I can easily see, won't work. I circle around and around the same set of…

Liron Shapira debates AI luminaries and public intellectuals on the imminent possibility of human extinction. Let’s get on the P(Doom) Train. LINKS Doom Debates on YouTube Doom Debates podcast Most Watched Debate – Mike Israetel Liron’s current favorite debate – David Duvenaud MATS program for people that want to get involved (ML Alignment & Theory…

We recently discovered some concerning behavior in OpenAI's reasoning models: When trying to complete a task, these models sometimes actively circumvent shutdown mechanisms in their environment––even when they’re explicitly instructed to allow themselves to be shut down. AI models are increasingly trained to solve problems without human assistance.…