LessWrong posts by zvi

Your monthly hit of all the things that are fit to print without a better place to live.

Today is election day here in New York City, so again a reminder that if you are a registered Democrat and live in NY-12 today is the final day to vote for Alex Bores for Congress, and as per my argument yesterday that this matters a lot for ensuring we have a sensible Congressional response to AI.

RIP FiveThirtyEight

ABC and Disney completely take down FiveThirtyEight and all its articles, after telling Nate Silver they would refuse to sell it to him at any price because Nate had criticized their management of the brand. Nate Silver took this opportunity to reminisce and tell some stories about the old website, and the reasons the path of not seeking revenue and working with an entity too big to care ultimately doomed them.

‘What a bunch of assholes,’ indeed. I can grudgingly accept this sort of thing when it maximizes profits and the amount is meaningful, but this is different.

Jack: This sort of digital arson is so frustrating. Pretty sure Dante had a place in mind for rights-holders [...]
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Outline:
(00:33) RIP FiveThirtyEight
(01:31) RIP Books
(02:18) Bad News
(09:53) Good Advice
(18:31) Opportunity Knocks
(19:15) Lower Awareness
(22:21) The New York Times Has Some Issues
(22:47) Liar Liar
(25:51) Conspiracy Theory
(26:16) Good News, Everyone
(26:31) For Your Entertainment
(28:00) A Matter of Taste
(35:21) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(37:33) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
(38:38) Sports Go Sports
(39:09) Government Working
(42:03) Jones Act Watch
(43:02) Humans Can Be Strategic
(44:58) Variously Effective Altruism
(46:14) Support Anti-Aging Research
(47:25) The Lighter Side
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First published:

June 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Taa4zmSNtD5S99tJT/monthly-roundup-43-june-2026

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GLM-5.2 arrived last week. It boasts excellent benchmarks and looks strong.

Benchmarks here are a de facto ceiling of how good it is, not a point estimate. Essentially all other aspects of an open model like this, beyond speed and price, will almost always be worse than the numbers suggest. Still, impressive.

It is definitely a large step up from GLM-5.1, and likely the strongest open model.

GLM-5.2 is still substantially behind the absolute frontier, although plausibly on the cost-benefit Pareto frontier. It seems closer to the frontier than previous efforts, including probably closer than DeepSeek R1 was during the DeepSeek moment.

This is the new ‘peak close behind’ moment. Its existence is a substantial updates to push back some of the ‘where are all the updates’ updates in the opposite direction over time.

Purely in terms of core tasks that GLM-5.2 is capable of doing, and ignoring missing features and its inferior generalization, and ignoring that it is distilled from Claude, and ignoring the Mythos class of models, and marking purely from date of public release, you can make a case GLM-5.2 is somewhere between 4 months and 7 months behind the frontier [...]
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Outline:
(02:01) Alex Bores For Congress In NY-12
(03:41) Signs of Life
(05:05) The Benchmarks
(09:02) GLM-5.2 Is Distilled From Claude
(09:55) Positive Responses
(16:00) Finding The Niche
(17:30) Negative Reactions
(20:05) Looking To The Future
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First published:

June 22nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reXkwJbB8GYdeuvDt/glm-5-2-is-the-new-best-open-model

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Only three days after the release of Claude Fable 5, Anthropic was forced by the United States Government to make it unavailable, when a jailbreak was brought to its attention, rather than the previous situation of ‘yes obviously experts can jailbreak anything if they care enough’ and ‘yes obviously you can ask Fable to fix your code.’

Three days was enough time for many of us to learn to love Fable, and for us to dearly miss it now that it is gone. The world was briefly smarter, and now it is again stupider. At some point it will get smarter again, which will likely be within two weeks.

This post is written as if Fable 5 is again available for public use, rather than trying to include a lot of qualifying clauses. It remains to be seen how this will play out, and this post does not attempt to cover that question.

My previous release coverage of Fable covered the model card and then model welfare. Coverage of the government takedown of Fable starts here, and continues here and here.

The Official Pitch

The pitch is that Fable 5 is the best model [...]
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Outline:
(01:08) The Official Pitch
(04:06) Technical Details
(04:31) The System Prompt and Jailbreak
(06:45) Benchmarks
(15:22) Other People's Benchmarks
(21:08) The Classifiers Are Not Messing Around
(22:53) The Classifiers Need Work
(28:15) The Classifiers Have Consequences
(29:18) First Hit Is Free
(29:53) How Easily We Forget
(30:46) Data Retention Is An Issue
(31:15) Fable For The Win
(36:15) Andrej Karpathy Is Impressed
(37:54) Every Is Very Impressed
(39:04) Other People Are Impressed
(51:10) Know How To Tell a Fable
(53:06) You Can Just Make Things
(55:37) You Can Just Install Things
(56:05) Good Personality
(57:51) Fable Writes A Fable
(01:06:04) Is That Code
(01:08:32) Fable Crosses The Threshold
(01:09:12) Man With A Plan
(01:10:12) Less Impressed Assessments
(01:13:39) Actively Negative Assessments
(01:14:16) Coherence
(01:15:27) Good Night And Good Luck
(01:16:05) Curious Fable
(01:16:23) I See You, Baby
(01:16:40) We Finally Did It We Know How To Count Letters
(01:17:46) That's Not My Style
(01:20:12) The Lighter Side
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First published:

June 19th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kMnobCQp9z2pSbzDB/claude-fable-5-and-mythos-5-capabilities

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A lot of things are always happening. Only one story matters.

Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 were shut down, by the White House, via an imposition of export controls at 5:23pm on Friday, wreaking all sorts of havoc.

There was then a scramble. Anthropic flew its people out to Washington, where they met with the Trump Administration on Monday, with hopes expressed that this could be quickly resolved.

What caused this? The Trump Administration said it was due to a jailbreak of Fable, which we now know they were told about by Amazon. They called Dario Amodei, who they complain did not take the issue sufficiently seriously. Rather than shutting down the model, he tried to explain why he saw no need to do that. This did not go well.

The ‘jailbreak’ turns out to be saying ‘fix this code,’ and the demo was getting Fable to find the same weaknesses that were easily identified by Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. As in, Fable is willing to work to fix security vulnerabilities if you give it a codebase. From this information and process, you could then figure out what the original bug in the [...]
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Outline:
(02:40) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:51) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(03:14) Huh, Upgrades
(03:44) On Your Marks
(08:43) VirtueBench
(10:40) Choose Your Fighter
(11:20) Papers, Please
(11:48) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(13:32) Goodhart's Law Strikes Again
(14:23) They Took Our Jobs
(16:49) The MidJourney Full Body Imaging Scanner
(19:16) Introducing
(20:36) In Other AI News
(22:47) Show Me the Money
(23:18) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
(24:51) Quiet Speculations
(27:15) People Just Say Things
(30:30) The Widened Path
(32:34) Scott Alexander Lays Out His AI Opinions
(38:36) Quickly, There's No Time
(39:50) Policy On The AI Exponential
(49:36) Anthropic Offers Two Policy Frameworks
(50:46) Obligations of Developers
(55:11) Societal Resilience Measures
(56:20) Economic Policy Framework
(01:01:26) White House Pauses AI Deployment
(01:10:14) The Once And Future Fable
(01:15:29) How To Fix This Code
(01:17:14) The End of Privacy
(01:18:45) AIs Have Preferences
(01:20:56) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:23:37) Chip City
(01:24:14) The Week in Audio
(01:24:25) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:25:03) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:26:40) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:27:53) The Lighter Side
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:

June 18th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P7jBmCeBDq2ebojWY/ai-173-ai-pauses

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The mainstream media continues to sleep on the most important story in the world.

It has now been two days since Anthropic flew its people out to Washington, and I offered my previous update. We have heard nothing back from those meetings.

Prediction market prices have moved rapidly, and have once again stabilized at about a 55% chance of restoration by July 1, 30% by June 26 and 12% by June 19.

That seems modestly higher than I would put those numbers, but not unreasonable.

Every day that Fable remains unavailable further damages America, its cyber defenses, its productivity and the world's trust in its AI and supposed ‘tech stack.’

Every day that Mythos remains unavailable is a day the free world's top companies and cyber defenders lose in their race against the avalanche headed their way.

Mostly we have learned and confirmed more about exactly what happened. We know more about what Amazon did, what the official letter said, what the supposed ‘jailbreak’ was (literally, and I am not making this up, ‘fix this code’) and more.

It is all about as stupid as it could have been.

Table of [...]
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Outline:
(01:22) There Was No Fable Jailbreak
(07:16) If This Jailbreak Was Real It Would Be Trivial To Prove It
(08:35) No Eyes
(09:41) What The Letter Actually Said
(11:29) Anthropic Cannot Challenge This But If It Did Then It Plausibly Wins
(13:28) What Happened At Amazon
(17:43) This Was Not About Chinese Access
(18:01) Absolute Discretion And Ad Hockery Is Not Deregulation
(20:43) All Of American AI Is Permanently Damaged As This Continues
(22:14) Dean Ball Gives His Interpretation
(25:03) Again, Yes, I Do Think Anthropic Should Have Taken Fable Down
(28:02) To What Extent Was This A Deliberate Attack?
(32:55) The Next Chapter For Fable
(36:59) Our Continuing Coverage
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First published:

June 17th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HaHzwvhbWam4n8hJB/the-once-and-future-fable-3-fix-this-code

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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