LessWrong posts by zvi

Enough things added up that this week is getting split into two parts.

Then on Monday, if all goes as I expect, we’ll cover OpenAI's Sol, aka GPT-5.6.

OpenAI also gave us an upgraded voice mode, which I haven’t tried out but early reports are that it is a step change.

AI writing, especially Claude writing, is becoming more prominent and harder not to notice, and increasingly a tough read when encountered in the wild. Does anyone care? Or are those who care the weird ones here?

This week saw an excellent paper, which I cover in No Space Like J-Space.

Technically we also got Grok 4.5.

Table of Contents


Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. A whole new world.

Language Models Gain Unexpected Affordances. Wait, you can just do that?

Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Things get old.

Pay The Man His Money. You have a few more days with marginally free Fable.

Huh, Upgrades. Anthropic raises API platform limits.

Grok 4.5 Exists. It might be okay for its price.

F*** It We’re Doing It Live. OpenAI gives us a big upgrade to voice [...]
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Outline:
(00:54) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:21) Language Models Gain Unexpected Affordances
(06:12) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(06:54) Pay The Man His Money
(07:37) Huh, Upgrades
(07:45) Grok 4.5 Exists
(09:12) F\*\*\* It We're Doing It Live
(10:24) On Your Marks
(11:13) Better Call Sol
(22:40) Get My Agent On The Line
(23:29) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(25:33) Fool Me Twice
(27:23) I Like Your Style
(33:28) Enough With That Style
(36:58) Fun With Media Generation
(38:51) Copyright Confrontation
(39:30) Cyber Lack of Security
(39:52) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
(45:56) They Took Our Jobs
(51:07) Get Involved
(52:10) In Other AI News
(56:44) Show Me the Money
(57:09) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
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First published:

July 9th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M9eLyMsH5DLjMYL86/ai-176-part-1-doing-it-live

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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We have a respite, so I thought I’d tackle various thoughts on children, phones and screens. GPT-5.6-Sol drops tomorrow, and the Fable agents are hard at work.

I’ll start with the other screens, then finish with the phones.

Table of Contents


EdTech.

NonEdTech.

Do Not Ban Social Media Outright.

Some Modern Kids Media Is Pretty Great.

Ban Phones In Schools (1).

Your Offer Is Acceptable.

Ban Phones In Schools (2).

Screen Time.

Inappropriate Content.

EdTech

Increasingly, when you pick a school, you are picking EdTech. The school will put your child on a tablet or computer, and expect them to learn that way.

In theory, with sufficient assistance and bespoke design and incentive structures, this is The Way. It sure seems way better than ‘sit and listen to a lecture.’

I am especially excited for Alpha School's version of this, with its bespoke designs and high level of both expectations and continuous human support.

Alas, most people are getting a much worse version, that is much worse than what you could easily improvise at home. I’m less concerned with ‘EdTech provider [...]
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First published:

July 8th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XA8fMCnwuc45uZYHX/childhood-and-education-20-phones-and-screens

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

There is a new very cool Anthropic paper: Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models. You can read the blog post verison here.

I encourage reading of the whole original blog post or paper, if you have the time.

Table of Contents


Through A Different Lens.

Establishing J-Space As A Global Workspace.

Are You Pondering What I’m Pondering?

Assistant J.

The Power Of Virtuous Thinking.

High Praise.

Everyone Remains Confused About Consciousness.

Further Research.

Don’t Think.

Through A Different Lens

They call this discovered area of ‘conscious access,’ where things are available for the model to do what in humans we would call conscious reasoning, the ‘J-space,’ after a new interpretability technique called the Jacobian Lens.

The Jacobian Lens computes, for each layer, the average causal effect of changes in the residual stream on the model's eventual outputs, averaged across a wide variety of contexts. Then you can trace what concepts are associated with each layer as the model proceeds through.

At each layer, the J-lens vectors form an overcomplete set.

… We observe that only a relatively small [...]
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Outline:
(00:26) Through A Different Lens
(02:02) Establishing J-Space As A Global Workspace
(04:55) Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?
(08:50) Assistant J
(09:42) The Power Of Virtuous Thinking
(17:08) High Praise
(22:37) Everyone Remains Confused About Consciousness
(31:17) Further Research
(34:26) Don't Think
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First published:

July 7th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EnxHPxJT4Xin5cTsX/no-space-like-j-space

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The blip is over. We have Fable back.

Utah teapot: happy fable/mythos easter Wednesday, to those who celebrate

Here is the official letter restoring Fable, great job everyone. Notice it is addressed to Tom Brown, not to Dario Amodei.

Anthropic had to make the controls more stupid for now, but this is a big win.

j⧉nus: YES!!! I’m really proud of Anthropic for their successful negotiation with the government. Also positive update on the government being sane and possible to cooperate with. Afaik Anthropic didn’t need to agree to any bad terms / genuflect / betray their principles or dignity.

The fiasco continues, at least until such time as we have a systematic regime in place for future frontier models rather than decisions being made ad hoc, by people like Lutnik and Bessent who do not know how any of this works.

The Blip

Anthropic explains its version of what happened.

Here is the timeline:


Amazon researchers discover they can ask Fable to ‘fix this code.’

They alert the White House, which freaks out.

June 12: US government tells Anthropic to take down Fable on its own.
[...] ---
Outline:
(01:33) The Blip
(08:08) The White House Explanation
(10:06) Everything Remains Ad Hoc
(10:37) Take What You Can Get
(12:18) The Problem Is Real
(13:16) GLM-5.2 Being Frontier Remains Obvious Nonsense
(16:29) Mythos Might Be Smarter Than You Are
(19:10) Let The Record Reflect
(20:41) Stationary Bandits
(25:02) Use This Window Well
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First published:

July 3rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r9HsHHSsfABhhxnYr/fable-6-the-return-of-the-king

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Fable's back. Back again. Fable's back. Tell a friend. Use your free week to its fullest.

This is excellent news. The blip only lasted a few weeks.

It was still a fiasco, and we have to deal with the fallout.

Our system remains fully ad hoc. The precedent has been set that we may use export controls on models, or order them taken down on 90 minutes of notice based on a misunderstanding. At least some amount of counterproductive additional locking down has occurred to address Amazon's little demonstration and reassure the government. And for now GPT-5.6 remains in limbo, awaiting its verdict, while OpenAI talks about giving away 5% of the company as tribute.

I’ll cover that continuing situation on its own. Whereas the weekly post is about everything else happening in AI this week.

Table of Contents


Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Exploratory science.

Language Models Offer Mundane Utility You May Not Want. Google sees all.

Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Too dumb to get smart.

Huh, Upgrades. GLM-5.2 faster, Nana Banana Lite 2, Claude Desktop on Linux.

On Your Marks. Remote labor index shoots [...]
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Outline:
(01:08) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:29) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility You May Not Want
(04:32) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(05:59) Huh, Upgrades
(06:33) On Your Marks
(09:28) Get My Agent On The Line
(14:29) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(14:58) Cyber Lack of Security
(16:11) On Writing
(21:34) You Drive Me Crazy
(24:26) They Took Our Jobs
(30:32) Get Involved
(30:58) Introducing
(31:21) In Other AI News
(32:45) Show Me the Money
(33:12) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
(35:31) Quiet Speculations
(39:37) Glorious AI Future
(43:37) Three Pills
(44:58) The Anthropic Economic Index
(46:29) Leader Of The PAC
(47:48) Theory Of The AI Firm
(49:01) Chip City
(50:32) The Week in Audio
(53:29) People Really Hate AI
(56:31) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:00:31) The First Rule Of Functional Decision Theory Is
(01:03:40) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:06:40) Names Have Power
(01:07:40) Cooperative Alignment
(01:15:21) People Just Say Things
(01:16:46) Escape From The Permanent Underclass
(01:29:51) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:31:07) The Lighter Side
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First published:

July 2nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WNvBxtbHuLreFe7af/ai-175-the-fable-continues

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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