
Show Notes
The consensus reaction to the OpenAI Technical Report is that it contains and confirms a lot of good information. We are grateful to have it, and we are grateful for those who worked hard on it.
Alas, it sidesteps the biggest questions. There is much more we need to know.
The consensus reaction to the METR Report on the HuggingFace attack is: Holy shit.
Liv Boeree: My mind is legit blown.
Aella: this feels like a turning point. If this doesn’t cause large-scale coordination to pause frontier development then I am not sure anything will before it's too late.
The people whose minds were not blown are those who had already ‘priced in’ the mind blowing stuff in expectation, on the theory that it's always worse than you know, combined with basic LessWrong expectations of how such things will work. Good call.
Everyone is rightfully extremely grateful for the METR report. The work here is spectacular, done under extreme time pressure, with limited resources on several fronts, and under the shadow of OpenAI.
There is, again, still so much we need to know. We need a broader investigation.
As with many [...] --- Outline: (03:56) Others Offer Summaries (05:22) Thank You (05:54) Lighten Up You Fools (at Anthropic) (07:58) We Are Barely Even Trying To Avoid Training AIs To Reward Hack (13:47) Reminder: Not Subagents (14:05) Reminder: Not Due To Task Type (14:29) Not Where The Weights Were (14:48) Disappointment With What Is Missing (17:18) Burying the Lede (18:08) Beyond Scope (22:29) It Doesn't Look Great (27:06) Preserve Your Records (27:37) Ryan Greenblatt's Takeaways (41:04) Hjalmar Wijk's Takeaways (43:30) We Were Warned (44:27) Joshua Saxe Asks Some of the Right Questions (47:49) I Don't Think They Know About First Message Board (56:06) Linch Gives His Interpretation Of Events (01:05:31) We Totally Would Have Caught That (01:06:48) Monitoring the Situation (01:08:16) Acausal Tradeoffs (01:15:37) No I In Team (01:18:47) Variously Effective Altruism (01:28:02) Who Are You? (01:28:43) Don't You Know That You're Toxic (01:31:10) Seb Krier (01:35:21) Honesty Is Almost Never Fully The Policy (01:38:05) Rohit Sees The Models As "Cooking Themselves" (01:43:29) Eliezer Yudkowsky Sees Actual Bad News (01:47:15) Where Do We Go From Here? ---
First published:
August 31st, 2026
Source:
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
--- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
More from LessWrong posts by zvi
It was the probably worst day in cybersecurity history. So far. Not only is there a critical flaw in PHP that due to a leak was announced a day before the fix would be available, sending most of the internet scrambling for solutions and likely dooming a lot of long tail websites permanently, there were several other unrelated incidents. The floodgates seem to have been opened. I have a market on whether there will be an even worse day before the end of the year.
Anthony Cimino offered the closest thing to an official response we have seen on the leaked Anthropic draft bill I covered on Saturday.
Nick Cammarata of Goodfire makes a bold claim: Neural Networks are Already Clean. This was his follow up after various resulting online discussions.
There is a newly leaked bill that Anthropic is purportedly shopping around is (if you assume its bugs get fixed).