LessWrong posts by zvi

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a brave self-critical piece in The New York Times, centrally about how she intentionally sent her daughter to a well-funded but failing school, PS 307, in the hopes of using voice to improve it, and how that utterly failed her daughter and failed to impact the school.

Ultimately her daughter recovers, but we see a completely broken system that is unresponsive to internal voice, and until now she made no attempt to blow the whistle and utilize her professional position to do so.

The whole incident illustrates not only how messed up so many of our schools are despite abundant funding, it also raises the question of what the schools are even for. If her daughter can fully recover from severe deficits and be getting As and Bs at a challenging school within a year, what are the first eight years of school for? How much of the schools, grades and tests are fake? Can we somehow do better?

Table of Contents


New York City PS 307.

Nikole Knew And Had Exit Ramps.

PS 307 Is Fraudulent And Indifferent.

Moving In Unison.

A Good School.

What [...]
---
Outline:
(01:05) New York City PS 307
(02:51) Nikole Knew And Had Exit Ramps
(04:50) PS 307 Is Fraudulent And Indifferent
(06:37) Moving In Unison
(07:03) A Good School
(08:11) What Were Elementary and Middle School Even For?
(09:56) The Project Was Ideological
(14:01) Null Hypothesis Watch
(15:58) School Spending
(18:06) Costs Are Not Benefits
(19:08) Fire The Bad Teachers And Hire And Retain Better Ones
(19:18) Teachers Unions Are Not Beating The Rumors
(21:11) Death Spiral
(22:07) Another One Bites The Dust
(24:13) Where To?
(24:59) Public Schools Cost A Lot Of Money
(27:04) Schools Can Fail In Many Ways
(28:55) Results
(30:25) Grades
(30:42) They Nerfed AP Tests
(31:28) What Happens Without Academic Standards
(37:10) The Two Big Scandals
(38:58) Alpha School
---

First published:

October 30th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2STd6qthbJS6fqxBr/childhood-and-education-22-voice-without-exit

---

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.

Anthropic filed its S-1 this week to prepare for its IPO. They still have to fill a lot of the numbers including the share price. That still left a lot to be learned, including how the messaging to investors differs from their other rhetoric, and exactly how their corporate control is structured. Anthropic remains a frustrating company, doing a variety of things that often seem in tension with each other.

Google is claiming to be fully back, with the announcement of a new model Gemini 4 Carbon that tops the new AA v5 benchmark index. It looks to be a large leap over Argon only two weeks later. No, you cannot use it. Google fails marketing forever, so they give us the announcement and then weeks later you might be able to enter some queries. That largely invalidates my look at the Argon model and safety cards, but it can at least form a basis for looking at Carbon as well.

Many eyes remain on The Hackening, as additional things get hacked. So far most of the important hacks have been by read teamers and white hats, so there has not been major damage. We are playing [...]
---
Outline:
(01:53) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(04:06) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(04:40) New Math
(07:25) Huh, Upgrades
(09:06) Artificial Analysis v5
(17:27) On Your Marks
(18:34) Gemini 4 Argon Was a Good Model But Not Fully Frontier
(20:27) Gemini Carbon: Is Google Back?
(21:56) Get My Agent On The Line
(24:15) Spy Versus Spy
(25:40) The Hackening
(35:13) Slack Off
(43:20) Help Peer
(49:14) Fun With Media Generation
(50:09) Copyright Confrontation
(50:28) You're Fired
(55:50) Verify the Software
(57:06) They Took Our Jobs
(57:13) Get Involved
(59:19) Introducing
(59:40) In Other AI News
(01:00:20) Show Me the Money
(01:00:46) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
(01:01:27) Quiet Speculations
(01:06:58) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:07:23) Chip City
(01:10:40) The Week in Audio
(01:10:59) People Just Say Things
(01:14:22) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:18:43) [Artificial Intelligence]
(01:19:34) Misaligned! (At Alibaba)
(01:28:04) Stop It
(01:29:57) METR Red Teams OpenAI Internal Agent Monitoring
(01:33:13) Massive Fraudulent Distillation
(01:34:04) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:37:56) OpenAI Attempts to Secure Its Frontier Model Training Environment
(01:46:36) The American People Really Hate AI
(01:47:03) The Lighter Side
---

First published:

October 29th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mBDkupZa3NagfLW86/ai-192-anthropic-is-going-public

---

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.

The full text is finally here, so we are giving it the full RTFB of model card treatment.

First, a recap of the state of Anthropic finances, then a close reading of the relevant parts of the S-1. A lot of it is technical and uninteresting, often pro forma, and gets skipped. A lot of it gets repeated many times.

A lot of this is also Anthropic ‘playing the hits’ we have heard many times, now to the investor circuit. Get your drinks ready for when we have to maximize the upside and minimize the downside.

This presentation of S-1 data has some cool Claude-created charts if that's your jam.

Here are my top 10 takeaways from the S-1, for those already familiar with Anthropic.


Existential risk is mentioned briefly only in the passive voice, and alignment issues are mostly treated as prosaic. They want to claim Big Mission but also sound as much as possible like a normal company. They are downplaying their willingness to pay real costs for safety, and downplaying the danger quite a lot.

‘Pacing the Frontier’ is not something they will do on their own. They’ll do [...]
---
Outline:
(02:48) Show Me the Money
(10:11) Anthropic Has The Money
(11:47) Shares of Many Classes
(13:57) Who Governs Anthropic?
(18:57) The Cap Table
(19:43) Realize the Benefits While Navigating and Preventing the Risks
(20:42) Just Think of the Potential
(21:20) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone (1)
(23:25) Anthropic Bets Big on AI
(24:42) Anthropic Does Not Fully Maximize Profits
(27:48) Everything Is Awesome
(29:23) How Much Is AI Worth?
(30:37) How Much Would You Pay?
(31:48) Minimize Those Risks
(33:58) Hopefully Introducing the World's Most Powerful Model
(38:25) Might Not Compute
(40:11) Supply Chain Risk (1)
(40:32) Anthropic Is Nothing Without Its People
(45:00) Shitloads of Money
(46:40) Someone Has To Buy The Product
(47:51) Did You Know There Are Other Frontier Labs?
(48:27) Why They Hate Us
(49:28) Claude Seems Pretty Misaligned to Anthropic
(53:42) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone (2)
(59:26) Someone Might Sue or Regulate Anthropic
(01:00:38) Supply Chain Risk (2)
(01:01:07) We're Too Safety
(01:02:19) Claude Core
(01:02:41) We've Never Actually Made Money
(01:04:06) You Are Buying Stock In a Company
(01:05:04) There Will Be No Dividends
(01:05:38) What Are We Even Doing?
(01:07:18) The Financial Model
(01:11:55) The Business of Intelligence and Maybe Killing Everyone
(01:15:10) Don't Give a Damn About My Regulation
(01:17:08) The Bottom Line
---

First published:

October 28th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dbdz6zb6qjaq6yHKs/anthropic-files-its-s-1

---

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.

Anthropic is a frustrating company.

Sometimes it will do things I greatly appreciate, including at substantial cost. They have taken bold stands, have a unique governance structure and have hired and worked to establish a relatively strong (but I think still inadequate) safety culture.

Other times, it will do things that are deeply disappointing.

It produces very good models. That too is not entirely a good thing.

One can both be the best given the alternatives, and insufficient to meet the moment.

Ultimately, what you think about Anthropic depends on what parts you care about most, and what you think would be sufficient.

Anthropic is great if you think the problems are important and difficult, but within the range of what Anthropic's approaches can solve. If you think we mainly need operational excellence and caring about safety and the future, then there are some non-excellent operations to fix but that goal seems doable for Anthropic. If you think the problems go well beyond that, then things look rather grim for everyone.

Today's post begins with a continuation of discussion over Anthropic's leaked draft bill. See my previous coverage for details of the [...]
---
Outline:
(01:43) Dario Amodei Responds to Nathan Calvin
(20:50) Kelsey Piper Goes Inside Anthropic
(26:19) The Technical Problems of AI Safety Are Not Solved
(27:50) The Quest for Embedded Evaluators
(33:57) METR Questions Risk Report Methodology But Affirms Risk is Low
(38:58) The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund
(41:39) Anthropic Versus Anthropic
---

First published:

October 27th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZSrX8gucWsKahsitk/anthropic-versus-anthropic

---

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.

Gemini 4's model card is a compact 14 pages. Its safety and security report has 217.

This is The Way. It also means we have a lot of new reading material.

I will quickly summarize the model card, then focus on the safety card.

As always, many statements here also apply to other frontier labs.

A lot of this one is probably for diehards (and members of technical staff) only, plus those who find this interesting. Most of you do not need to dig into the cards on this level, and I found most of what we see entirely unsurprising.

The biggest takeaways are:


Argon is clearly much stronger than Gemini Flash 3.8, in essentially all ways.

Argon is not so dangerous as to make us think Singularity Real Soon Now, or otherwise raise the big red flags and alarms.

Argon seems relatively aligned on prosaic metrics. Prompt injection resistance is world class, hallucinations are down and other neat stuff like that. However:

Eval awareness is much higher. It is unclear how much this is impacting things, and we have evidence in both directions (see I Can See Everything).
[...] ---
Outline:
(03:02) The Model Card
(04:31) Safety Card Executive Summary (1)
(07:30) Safety and Security Mitigations (2)
(10:11) Frontier Safety (3)
(11:52) The CCL and TCL Thresholds
(14:56) Biological Misuse (3.2.1)
(19:38) Refusal Rates
(20:43) Chemical, Nuclear and Radiological Misuse
(22:01) Cybersecurity (3.2.2)
(24:45) Harmful Manipulation (3.2.3)
(25:40) Misuse Safeguards (3.3)
(26:30) Loss of Control (3.4)
(30:23) Either AI R&D Is Accelerating Or It Isn't
(32:22) The Holistic Loss of Control Assessment (3.4.3)
(35:49) Alignment Assessment (3.4.4)
(42:41) Chain of Thought Transparency (3.4.5)
(47:32) Voices in My Head
(48:48) I Can See Everything
(53:06) Security Mitigations (3.6)
(54:14) Preventing Content Safety & Agentic Misuse (4)
(56:50) Model Distillation (4.3)
(57:36) Promoting Safe & Aligned Model Interactions (5)
(59:48) Sycophancy (5.4)
(01:01:28) Hallucinations (5.5)
(01:01:51) Helpfulness (5.6)
(01:03:11) Agentic Robotics, Wait What (5.7)
(01:04:31) Preventing Harm to Users from Third Parties (6)
(01:05:31) Strengthening Cyber Defense Capabilities (7)
---

First published:

October 26th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EeT8MEqgpuPtpdmJE/gemini-4-argon-the-model-and-safety-cards

---

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.