
Show Notes
OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki is dropping truth bombs.
Tomorrow I will discuss Astra's lack of monitorability, and the potential contributing factors to that. The situation is alarming and should freak you out, and briefly it looked, in the wake of leaked architectural changes, like the situation might be even more alarming than it is. Jakub rushed to try and head off misunderstandings that might lead to a race to the bottom on monitorability.
Table of Contents
An Excellent Warning.
Branches of the Tech Tree.
Universally Better Is Not Required.
Alignment To What and To Whom.
Monitorability.
The Case For Not Stopping.
Pacing the Next Frontier.
Mea Culpa Cascade.
The Calls Are Coming From Inside the House.
Actions Speak Louder.
An Excellent Warning
Jakub Pachocki has now fleshed out his full position on the current state of play.
Here are his key points, translated into my own voice:
Smarter than human intelligence is coming in our lifetime.
Based on internal results, he expects recursive self-improvement in a few years.
No one is prepared for the consequences.
[...] --- Outline: (00:38) An Excellent Warning (05:40) Branches of the Tech Tree (06:46) Universally Better Is Not Required (08:01) Alignment To What and To Whom (11:49) Monitorability (14:23) The Case For Not Stopping (15:01) Pacing the Next Frontier (18:27) Mea Culpa Cascade (22:51) The Calls Are Coming From Inside the House (25:38) Actions Speak Louder ---
First published:
September 7th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8E6ng6CseuzafSxQR/an-alien-mind-jakub-pachocki-warns-us
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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).