(Cross-posted from speaker's notes of my talk at Deepmind today.) Good local time, everyone. I am Audrey Tang, 🇹🇼 Taiwan's Cyber Ambassador and first Digital Minister (2016-2024). It is an honor to be here with you all at Deepmind. When we discuss "AI" and "society," two futures compete. In one—arguably the default trajectory—AI supercharges confli…

This is a link post. So the situation as it stands is that the fraction of the light cone expected to be filled with satisfied cats is not zero. This is already remarkable. What's more remarkable is that this was orchestrated starting nearly 5000 years ago. As far as I can tell there were three completely alien to-each-other intelligences operating…

This is a link post. I've seen many prescriptive contributions to AGI governance take the form of proposals for some radically new structure. Some call for a Manhattan project, others for the creation of a new international organization, etc. The OGI model, instead, is basically the status quo. More precisely, it is a model to which the status quo …

The following work was done independently by me in an afternoon and basically entirely vibe-coded with Claude. Code and instructions to reproduce can be found here. Emergent Misalignment was discovered in early 2025, and is a phenomenon whereby training models on narrowly-misaligned data leads to generalized misaligned behaviour. Betley et. al. (20…

“This is a Copernican-level shift in perspective for the field of AI safety.” - Gemini 2.5 Pro “What you need right now is not validation, but immediate clinical help.” - Kimi K2 Two Minute Summary There have been numerous media reports of AI-driven psychosis, where AIs validate users’ grandiose delusions and tell users to ignore their friends’ and…

A studio executive has no beliefs That's the way of a studio system We've bowed to every rear of all the studio chiefs And you can bet your ass we've kissed 'em Even the birds in the Hollywood hills Know the secret to our success It's those magical words that pay the bills Yes, yes, yes, and yes! “Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking”, from SMASH S…

Summary: Perfectly labeled outcomes in training can still boost reward hacking tendencies in generalization. This can hold even when the train/test sets are drawn from the exact same distribution. We induce this surprising effect via a form of context distillation, which we call re-contextualization: Generate model completions with a hack-encouragi…

It's been roughly 7 years since the LessWrong user-base voted on whether it's time to close down shop and become an archive, or to move towards the LessWrong 2.0 platform, with me as head-admin. For roughly equally long have I spent around one hundred hours almost every year trying to get Said Achmiz to understand and learn how to become a good Les…

People very often underrate how much power they (and their allies) have, and overrate how much power their enemies have. I call this “underdog bias”, and I think it's the most important cognitive bias for understanding modern society. I’ll start by describing a closely-related phenomenon. The hostile media effect is a well-known bias whereby people…

Many people who are concerned about existential risk from AI spend their time advocating for radical changes to how AI is handled. Most notably, they advocate for costly restrictions on how AI is developed now and in the future, e.g. the Pause AI people or the MIRI people. In contrast, I spend most of my time thinking about relatively cheap interve…

(Cross-posted from X, intended for a general audience.) There's a funny thing where economics education paradoxically makes people DUMBER at thinking about future AI. Econ textbooks teach concepts & frames that are great for most things, but counterproductive for thinking about AGI. Here are 4 examples. Longpost: THE FIRST PIECE of Econ anti-pedago…

Knowing how evolution works gives you an enormously powerful tool to understand the living world around you and how it came to be that way. (Though it's notoriously hard to use this tool correctly, to the point that I think people mostly shouldn't try it use it when making substantial decisions.) The simple heuristic is "other people died because t…

As I discussed in a prior post, I felt like there were some reasonably compelling arguments for expecting very fast AI progress in 2025 (especially on easily verified programming tasks). Concretely, this might have looked like reaching 8 hour 50% reliability horizon lengths on METR's task suite[1] by now due to greatly scaling up RL and getting lar…

This is a response to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mXa66dPR8hmHgndP5/hyperbolic-trend-with-upcoming-singularity-fits-metr which claims that a hyperbolic model, complete with an actual singularity in the near future, is a better fit for the METR time-horizon data than a simple exponential model. I think that post has a serious error in it and its…

On 12 August 2025, I sat down with New York Times reporter Cade Metz to discuss some criticisms of his 4 August 2025 article, "The Rise of Silicon Valley's Techno-Religion". The transcript below has been edited for clarity. ZMD: In accordance with our meetings being on the record in both directions, I have some more questions for you. I did not rea…

I’m going to describe a Type Of Guy starting a business, and you’re going to guess the business: The founder is very young, often under 25. He might work alone or with a founding team, but when he tells the story of the founding it will always have him at the center. He has no credentials for this business. This business has a grand vision, which h…

This will only be exciting to those of us who still read physical paper books. But like. Guys. They did it. They invented the perfect bookmark. Classic paper bookmarks fall out easily. You have to put them somewhere while you read the book. And they only tell you that you left off reading somewhere in that particular two-page spread. Enter the Book…

Sometimes I'm saddened remembering that we've viewed the Earth from space. We can see it all with certainty: there's no northwest passage to search for, no infinite Siberian expanse, and no great uncharted void below the Cape of Good Hope. But, of all these things, I most mourn the loss of incomplete maps. In the earliest renditions of the world, y…

A reporter asked me for my off-the-record take on recent safety research from Anthropic. After I drafted an off-the-record reply, I realized that I was actually fine with it being on the record, so: Since I never expected any of the current alignment technology to work in the limit of superintelligence, the only news to me is about when and how ear…

1. Back when COVID vaccines were still a recent thing, I witnessed a debate that looked like something like the following was happening: Some official institution had collected information about the efficacy and reported side-effects of COVID vaccines. They felt that, correctly interpreted, this information was compatible with vaccines being broadl…

Below some meta-level / operational / fundraising thoughts around producing the SB-1047 Documentary I've just posted on Manifund (see previous Lesswrong / EAF posts on AI Governance lessons learned). The SB-1047 Documentary took 27 weeks and $157k instead of my planned 6 weeks and $55k. Here's what I learned about documentary production Total fundi…

METR (where I work, though I'm cross-posting in a personal capacity) evaluated GPT-5 before it was externally deployed. We performed a much more comprehensive safety analysis than we ever have before; it feels like pre-deployment evals are getting more mature. This is the first time METR has produced something we've felt comfortable calling an "eva…

For the past five years I've been teaching a class at various rationality camps, workshops, conferences, etc. I’ve done it maybe 50 times in total, and I think I’ve only encountered a handful out of a few hundred teenagers and adults who really had a deep sense of what it means for emotions to “make sense.” Even people who have seen Inside Out, and…

This is a new introduction to AI as an extinction threat, previously posted to the MIRI website in February alongside a summary. It was written independently of Eliezer and Nate's forthcoming book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and isn't a sneak peak of the book. Since the book is long and costs money, we expect this to be a valuable resource…

All prediction market platforms trade continuously, which is the same mechanism the stock market uses. Buy and sell limit orders can be posted at any time, and as soon as they match against each other a trade will be executed. This is called a Central limit order book (CLOB). Example of a CLOB order book from Polymarket Most of the time, the market…