LessWrong posts by zvi

This is what a lull looks like at this point. The government is having internal arguments. The models are getting improved internally. The coding agent improvements are all what we would expect. There's still a lot happening, including a bunch of cool papers, but I feel able to relax and to take care of some other work while I have the chance. You never know when that chance will be over.

Table of Contents

From yesterday: Cyber Lack of Security and AI Governance.


Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Fix everything now.

Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Travel is harder than it looked.

Huh, Upgrades. Opus 4.7 fast mode, Claude Code /goal and agent view.

Levels of Friction. AI for tax avoidance.

On Your Marks. PrinzBench, ProgramBench and faster harmfulness checks.

Get My Agent On The Line. Mona tries to run a cafeteria. Mistakes were made.

Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Soon. But not quite yet.

Fun With Media Generation. Monet does not seem that great.

On AI Writing. AI is a hack writer using hack techniques.

A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. How to make AI [...]
---
Outline:
(00:36) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:25) Language Models Dont Offer Mundane Utility
(03:26) Huh, Upgrades
(04:02) Levels of Friction
(05:11) On Your Marks
(06:38) Get My Agent On The Line
(09:42) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(11:11) Fun With Media Generation
(12:49) On AI Writing
(16:05) A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer
(18:35) You Drive Me Crazy
(19:23) They Took Our Jobs
(21:31) The Art of the Jailbreak
(21:49) Introducing
(22:29) Claude Has Its Limits
(23:28) Show Me the Money
(25:15) Show Me The Compute
(26:58) Quiet Speculations
(28:33) Quickly, Theres No Time
(29:32) Chip City
(30:37) Pick Up The Phone
(31:15) The Week in Audio
(31:41) Rhetorical Innovation
(36:13) Not Leading the Future
(42:24) Elon Musk v OpenAI
(43:21) People Just Say Things
(43:47) People Just Publish Things
(44:37) OpenAI Endroses Kosa And SB 315
(48:08) The LLMs All Believe Roughly Similar Things
(50:45) I Learned It By Reading YOU
(01:08:22) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:18:45) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:20:34) Messages From Janusworld
(01:22:31) People Worried About AI For Other Reasons
(01:23:06) The Lighter Side
---

First published:

May 14th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E4uEiMSpnYRotfzJX/ai-168-not-leading-the-future

---

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 real recent story of AI has been the background work being done on Cybersecurity, as we process the Mythos Moment along with GPT-5.5, and figure out both how to patch the internet and what our new regulatory regime is going to look like.

The Trump Administration is being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the era of at least some situational awareness, and acknowledgment that catastrophic risks are very much a real risk and they need to have a role in supervising frontier model releases. Now that they’re there, Commerce is deciding who gets access to the most powerful model in the world, and they are fighting Intelligence and the national security state over who should be in charge.

Another question is, exactly how strong is Mythos, both compared to past model and to GPT-5.5 and also in absolute terms? We got multiple new reports on that, as well as the METR graph results. There's little question Mythos is a big deal, but there's a wide range of big deals out there.

Part of the new report from UK AISI is learning that there is a substantial gap between the abilities of the early Mythos Preview [...]
---
Outline:
(01:28) On Your Marks
(05:24) How Good Is Mythos?
(11:11) Cyber Lack of Security
(14:36) Greetings From The Department of War
(16:13) The Prior Restraint Era Begins
(20:59) Commerce Versus Intelligence
(27:43) The Quest for Sane Regulations
---

First published:

May 13th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pzjGXSKrkHGdGbtrW/cyber-lack-of-security-and-ai-governance

---

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.

We did reading yesterday. Now we do the math. Math is hard.

It does not have to be this hard.

A large part of the reason math is hard, or boring, is that education studies, especially in math, are worse than you know. It goes beyond the studies failing both math and statistics forever and into what I’d basically call fraud. Various people are at war with math education, and will do what it takes to stop it in its tracks. We must fight back.

Education Research Is Worse Than You Know

Kelsey Piper lets her title, ‘Education research is weak and sloppy. Why?’ completely downplay the level of utter awfulness she is reporting finding.

You know that whole thing where the entire Bay Area school system stopped teaching kids Algebra? That was motivated by criminal levels of fraud. I want Jo Boaler in jail doing hard time for this if it is accurate.

Here's the part before the paywall:

Kelsey Piper: Jo Boaler is a professor of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, with an enormously influential body of work arguing that students learn math faster and more effectively [...]
---
Outline:
(00:42) Education Research Is Worse Than You Know
(04:23) The War on Math
(06:59) University of California San Diego
(15:01) Beyond UCSD
(15:57) New York Cant Do Math
(16:43) The Academic Standards Seem Low
(19:34) New Math
(21:32) Math Anxiety Is Often Due To Knowledge Gaps
(23:52) Calculus By Eighth Grade Is Highly Practical For Many
---

First published:

May 12th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZGGgxy6SNPAy9Hj7v/childhood-and-education-18-do-the-math

---

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.

Reading is the most fundamental thing in education. If you can read, you can do and learn everything else. If you can’t read, well, you’re screwed.

We know how to teach reading to children. Phonics. The weird thing is we often choose to not do that, and instead to use methods that are known not to work. Principles often want to not do phonics. Teachers often heavily resist phonics. But yes, you can absolutely overcome this, as Mississippi and other Southern states have done, by insisting upon it and actually enforcing that insistence. You see huge gains.

Not all those gains persist into later grades, but a lot of the gains do persist.

No, that won’t get the children invested in reading lots of books on their own time. But given their alternatives and what we inflict on them, can you blame ‘em?

Table of Contents


Mississippi Can Read Now.

What Mississippi and Louisiana Did.

Spies In Every Classroom.

Mississippi Results Are Not Due To Retention.

Is Retention Helpful In General?

At Eighth Grade A Lot Of This Improvement Remains.

England Reforms Its Schools.

Mastery Learning.
[...] ---
Outline:
(01:06) Mississippi Can Read Now
(02:24) What Mississippi and Louisiana Did
(09:10) Spies In Every Classroom
(10:41) Mississippi Results Are Not Due To Retention
(15:54) Is Retention Helpful In General?
(19:46) At Eighth Grade A Lot Of This Improvement Remains
(20:41) England Reforms Its Schools
(21:45) Mastery Learning
(24:16) The War Against Reading
(26:24) Is Our Children Reading
(26:55) No One Reads Anymore
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
---

First published:

May 11th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dm2vQZPZcSKb8FhWw/childhood-and-education-17-is-our-children-reading

---

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.

When I started this series, everyone was going crazy for coding agents.

Now a lot more people are going crazy for coding agents, as well they should given how much better coding agents keep getting, but also Everybody Knows they are good and is focusing on actually using them. With the slower pace of news here it's no longer clear that the waits associated with doing these updates on their own are worthwhile, so I’m going to fold these updates into the weekly again for now unless there's a new major development.

Table of Contents


Whoops, Sorry.

Huh, Upgrades.

Codex of Ultimate Computer Use.

Rookie Numbers.

I See What You Did There.

Just a Ride.

They Didn’t Want Our Jobs.

Skilling Up.

The Lighter Side.

Whoops, Sorry

Claude Code suffered in April from three distinct issues that have now been fixed.


Default reasoning was changed from high to medium to deal with latency, but users disliked this and blamed it on the model. It was introduced on March 4 and reverted on April 7.

A bug made it so that [...]
---
Outline:
(00:38) Whoops, Sorry
(01:45) Huh, Upgrades
(04:13) Codex of Ultimate Computer Use
(08:05) Rookie Numbers
(09:12) I See What You Did There
(11:38) Just a Ride
(11:50) They Didnt Want Our Jobs
(18:30) Skilling Up
(22:08) The Lighter Side
---

First published:

May 8th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BS27ZWW2qwDEq5anx/claude-code-codex-and-agentic-coding-8

---

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.