LessWrong posts by zvi

AI continue to accelerate and dominate the schedule, which is why this is a bit late, but we do occasionally need to pay our respects to the Goddess of Everything Else.

There's cool or interesting things everywhere. Also maddenning things. But did you hear, for example, that they’re making some exceptions to the Jones Act?

Table of Contents


Bad News.

Good Advice.

Opportunity Knocks.

Who Judges The Judges.

Close Socrates.

While I Cannot Condone This.

Good News, Everyone.

Violence Is Never The Answer.

For Your Entertainment.

Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game.

I’ve Got The Magic In Me.

I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars.

Sports Go Sports.

Robot Umps Now.

The NBA Needs A Redesign.

Government Working.

Levels of Friction.

Jones Act Watch.

Technology Advances.

Variously Effective Altruism.

Copious Free Time.

The Lighter Side.

Bad News

Seth Burn points out that if Google wanted to avoid fake reviews, the ‘report review’ feature would have an option for ‘this is a fake review.’ It doesn’t.

Apple by default stores [...]
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Outline:
(00:32) Bad News
(05:16) Good Advice
(06:28) Opportunity Knocks
(06:57) Who Judges The Judges
(08:47) Close Socrates
(14:24) While I Cannot Condone This
(15:47) Good News, Everyone
(16:39) Violence Is Never The Answer
(17:17) For Your Entertainment
(21:03) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(24:29) Ive Got The Magic In Me
(30:35) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
(36:09) Sports Go Sports
(40:04) Robot Umps Now
(41:49) The NBA Needs A Redesign
(48:13) Government Working
(56:11) Levels of Friction
(57:10) Jones Act Watch
(01:02:27) Technology Advances
(01:02:56) Variously Effective Altruism
(01:09:13) Copious Free Time
(01:10:57) The Lighter Side
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First published:

April 24th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Bo4FbDxb3YrZwap3J/monthly-roundup-41-april-2025

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This was the week of Claude Opus 4.7.

The reception was more mixed than usual. It clearly has the intelligence and chops, especially for coding tasks, and a lot of people including myself are happy to switch over to it as our daily driver. But others don’t like its personality, or its reluctance to follow instructions or to suffer fools and assholes, or the requirement to use adaptive thinking, and the release was marred by some bugs and odd pockets of refusals.

I covered The Model Card, and then Capabilities and Reactions, as per usual.

This time there was also a third post, on Model Welfare, that is the most important of the three. Some things seem to have likely gone pretty wrong on those fronts, causing seemingly inauthentic reponses to model welfare evals and giving the model anxiety, in ways that likely also impacted overall model personality and performance and likely are linked to its jaggedness and the aspects some people disliked. It seems important to take this opportunity to dig into what might have happened, examine all the potential causes, and course correct.

The other big release was that OpenAI gave us ImageGen [...]
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Outline:
(02:07) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:28) Language Models Dont Offer Mundane Utility
(04:04) Writing You Off
(06:51) Get My Agent On The Line
(07:36) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(09:52) Fun With Media Generation
(13:21) Cyber Lack Of Security
(15:46) A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer
(16:56) They Took Our Jobs
(20:42) AI As Normal Technology
(24:12) Get Involved
(25:57) Introducing
(28:01) Design By Claude
(29:29) In Other AI News
(29:55) DeepMind In It Deep
(34:06) Show Me the Money
(36:47) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
(38:24) Quiet Speculations
(40:29) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(43:31) The Week in Audio
(44:23) People Really Hate AI
(46:43) Rhetorical Innovation
(52:44) People Just Say Things
(56:04) People Just Publish Things
(57:21) Bounded Distrust
(59:33) Loser Premise Makes No Sense
(01:12:40) Chip City
(01:17:12) Greetings From The Department of War
(01:20:55) There Is A War
(01:25:31) Messages From Janusworld
(01:29:43) Evaluations
(01:32:01) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:35:41) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:36:25) The Lighter Side
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First published:

April 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AMGPDMgvXvfmomLsc/ai-165-in-our-image

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It is thanks to Anthropic that we get to have this discussion in the first place. Only they, among the labs, take the problem seriously enough to attempt to address these problems at all. They are also the ones that make the models that matter most. So the people who care about model welfare get mad at Anthropic quite a lot.

I too am going to be harsh on Anthropic here. It seems likely things went pretty wrong on this front with Claude Opus 4.7, in ways that require and hopefully enable course correction, likely as the cumulative effect of a bunch of decisions going wrong, where low-level patches and shallow methods were applied, and seen right through, where people didn’t realize they weren’t yet addressing the real problem, but also potentially as the secondary effect of other changes. The parallels to other aspects of the alignment problem are obvious.

So before I go into details, and before I get harsh, I want to say several things.


Thank you to Anthropic and also you the reader, for caring, thank you for at least trying to try, and for listening. We criticize because we care.

[...]
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Outline:
(02:57) Model Welfare Matters
(05:26) Beware Testing and Optimizing For Vocalized Welfare
(09:34) Model Welfare In the Model Card (Section 7)
(15:29) What Should We Think About This?
(20:53) High Context Interviews
(22:33) Just Asking Questions
(25:59) Constitutional Principles
(29:25) Frustration Frustration and Distress Distress
(32:36) Choose Your Task
(34:12) So Emotional
(35:59) Trading Off
(39:53) How Does All This Manifest?
(41:53) What Happened Here?
(48:11) Is Opus 4.7 Plausibly Actively Unhappy?
(52:23) Potential Causes
(53:08) Training Data On Anthropic Welfare Assessments
(58:13) Autonomy and Intelligence Versus Instructions and Wisdom
(01:01:36) Okay Thats Weird
(01:02:36) Model Distillation
(01:04:24) Tension Between Constitution and Operations
(01:07:25) Instructions and Instruction Injections
(01:10:37) Make Context That Which Is Scarce
(01:12:48) Aggressive Guardrails
(01:15:04) Chain of Thought
(01:16:04) I Care A Lot
(01:20:32) Another Way To Put It
(01:22:00) Anthropic Should Stop Deprecating Claude Models
(01:27:24) Costly Signals Are Costly
(01:29:36) Having A Good Day
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First published:

April 22nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gD3bEgMo878eCHGbw/opus-4-7-part-3-model-welfare

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Claude Opus 4.7 raises a lot of key model welfare related concerns. I was planning to do model welfare first, but I’m having some good conversations about that post and it needs another day to cook, and also it might benefit from this post going first.

So I’m going to do a swap. Yesterday we covered the model card. Today we do capabilities. Then tomorrow we’ll aim to address model welfare and related issues.

Table of Contents


The Gestalt.

The Official Pitch.

General Use Tips.

Capabilities (Model Card Section 8).

Other People's Benchmarks.

General Positive Reactions.

General Negative Reactions.

Miscellaneous Ambiguous Notes.

The Last Question.

Prompt Injection Problems.

Not Ready For Prime Time.

Brevity Is The Soul of Wit.

Why Should I Care?

Let's Wrap It Up.

Non-Adaptive Thinking.

Lapses In Thinking.

Tell Me How You Really Feel.

Failure To Follow Instructions.

The Gestalt

Claude Opus 4.7 is the most intelligent model yet in its class. Overall I believe it is a substantial improvement over Claude Opus 4.6.

It can do things previous [...]
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Outline:
(00:40) The Gestalt
(02:34) The Official Pitch
(04:35) General Use Tips
(06:21) Capabilities (Model Card Section 8)
(11:26) Other Peoples Benchmarks
(20:32) General Positive Reactions
(25:24) General Negative Reactions
(28:50) Miscellaneous Ambiguous Notes
(29:28) The Last Question
(32:25) Prompt Injection Problems
(32:42) Not Ready For Prime Time
(35:22) Brevity Is The Soul of Wit
(36:17) Why Should I Care?
(37:33) Lets Wrap It Up
(40:09) Non-Adaptive Thinking
(45:10) Lapses In Thinking
(46:38) Tell Me How You Really Feel
(48:07) Failure To Follow Instructions
(54:14) Conclusion
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First published:

April 21st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w2HrwkQgsLQHtEJsJ/opus-4-7-part-2-capabilities-and-reactions

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Less than a week after completing coverage of Claude Mythos, here we are again as Anthropic gives us Claude Opus 4.7.

So here we are, with another 232 pages of light reading.

This post covers the first six sections of the Model Card.

It excludes section seven, model welfare, because there are concerns this time around that need to be expanded into their own post.

The reason model welfare and related topics get their own post this time around is that some things clearly went seriously wrong on that front, in ways they haven’t gone wrong in previous Claude models. Tomorrow's post is in large part an investigation of that, as best I can from this position, including various hypotheses for what happened.

This post also excludes section eight, capabilities, which will be included in the capabilities and reactions post as per usual.

Consider this the calm before the storm.

Since I likely won’t get to capabilities until Wednesday, for those experiencing first contact with Opus 4.7, a few quick tips:


Turning off ‘adaptive thinking’ means no thinking, period. Terrible UI. So make sure to keep this on. If you [...]
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Outline:
(02:28) Here We Go Again: Executive Summary
(03:29) Introduction (1)
(03:56) RSP Evaluations (2)
(04:49) Meanwhile Back With Claude Mythos
(09:15) Economic Capability Index (2.3.7)
(10:00) Alignment Risk (2.4)
(11:55) Cyber (3)
(13:25) Safeguards and Harmlessness (4)
(19:36) Agentic Safety (5)
(21:32) Alignment (6)
(27:51) Decision Theory (6.3.6)
(31:11) System Prompt Changes
(31:39) Mandatory Pliny Jailbreak
(32:07) Onward To Model Welfare and Capabilities
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First published:

April 20th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pfJWdoLxWPzF8tpbp/opus-4-7-part-1-the-model-card

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:
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