LessWrong posts by zvi

Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was one of those. So here we go.

As usual for podcast posts, the baseline bullet points describe key points made, and then the nested statements are my commentary. Some points are dropped.

If I am quoting directly I use quote marks, otherwise assume paraphrases.

Normally I keep everything to numbered lists, but in several cases here it was more of a ‘he didn’t just say what I think he did did he’ and I needed extensive quotes.

In addition to the podcast, there were some discussions around safety, or the lack thereof, at xAI, and Elon Musk went on what one can only describe as megatilt, including going hard after Anthropic's Amanda Askell. I will include that as a postscript.

I will not include recent developments regarding Twitter, since that didn’t come up in the interview.

I lead with a discussion of bounded distrust and how to epistemically consider Elon Musk, since that will be important throughout including in the postscript.

What are the key takeaways?


Elon Musk is more confused than [...]
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Outline:
(02:56) Bounded Distrust
(05:12) IN SPACE
(09:56) The AI Will Follow You To Mars
(22:32) xAI Business Plans
(25:54) Optimus Prime
(27:04) Beating China
(30:02) SpaceX and How To Run a Company Elon Style
(33:17) DOGE
(35:29) TeraFab IN SPACE
(35:47) Postscript: Safety Third at xAI
(40:15) Elon Serves Back Saying That Which Is Not
(42:51) Elons Army
(43:55) Children Are Our Future
(48:11) Where Do We Go From Here
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First published:

February 17th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yidbWsdWjNzWzLWZ/on-dwarkesh-patel-s-2026-podcast-with-elon-musk-and-other

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Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was very clearly one of those. So here we go.

As usual for podcast posts, the baseline bullet points describe key points made, and then the nested statements are my commentary. Some points are dropped.

If I am quoting directly I use quote marks, otherwise assume paraphrases.

What are the main takeaways?


Dario mostly stands by his predictions of extremely rapid advances in AI capabilities, both in coding and in general, and in expecting the ‘geniuses in a data center’ to show up within a few years, possibly even this year.

Anthropic's actions do not seem to fully reflect this optimism, but also when things are growing on a 10x per year exponential if you overextend you die, so being somewhat conservative with investment is necessary unless you are prepared to fully burn your boats.

Dario reiterated his stances on China, export controls, democracy, AI policy.

The interview downplayed catastrophic and existential risk, including relative to other risks, although it was mentioned and Dario remains concerned. There was essentially no talk about alignment [...]
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Outline:
(01:47) The Pace of Progress
(08:56) Continual Learning
(13:46) Does Not Compute
(15:29) Step Two
(22:58) The Quest For Sane Regulations
(26:08) Beating China
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First published:

February 16th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jWCy6owAmqLv5BB8q/on-dwarkesh-patel-s-2026-podcast-with-dario-amodei

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OpenAI is back with a new Codex model, released the same day as Claude Opus 4.6.

The headline pitch is it combines the coding skills of GPT-5.2-Codex with the general knowledge and skills of other models, along with extra speed and improvements in the Codex harness, so that it can now handle your full stack agentic needs.

We also got the Codex app for Mac, which is getting positive reactions, and quickly picked up a million downloads.

CPT-5.3-Codex is only available inside Codex. It is not in the API.

As usual, Anthropic's release was understated, basically a ‘here's Opus 4.6, a 212-page system card and a lot of benchmarks, it's a good model, sir, so have fun.’ Whereas OpenAI gave us a lot less words and a lot less benchmarks, while claiming their model was definitely the best.

OpenAI: GPT-5.3-Codex is the most capable agentic coding model to date, combining the frontier coding performance of GPT-5.2-Codex with the reasoning and professional knowledge capabilities of GPT-5.2. This enables it to take on long-running tasks that involve research, tool use, and complex execution.

Much like a colleague, you can steer and interact with GPT-5.3-Codex while [...]
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Outline:
(01:50) The Overall Picture
(03:00) Quickly, Theres No Time
(04:15) System Card
(04:49) AI Box Experiment
(05:22) Maybe Cool It With Rm
(07:02) Preparedness Framework
(11:14) Glass Houses
(12:16) OpenAI Appears To Have Violated SB 53 In a Meaningful Way
(14:29) Safeguards They Did Implement
(16:55) Misalignment Risks and Internal Deployment
(18:38) The Official Pitch
(24:28) Inception
(26:12) Turn The Beat Around
(27:35) Codex Does Cool Things
(29:33) Positive Reactions
(38:03) Negative Reactions
(40:43) Codex of Ultimate Vibing
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First published:

February 13th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CCDRjL7NZtNGtGheY/chatgpt-5-3-codex-is-also-good-at-coding

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Life comes at you increasingly fast. Two months after Claude Opus 4.5 we get a substantial upgrade in Claude Opus 4.6. The same day, we got GPT-5.3-Codex.

That used to be something we’d call remarkably fast. It's probably the new normal, until things get even faster than that. Welcome to recursive self-improvement.

Before those releases, I was using Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Code for essentially everything interesting, and only using GPT-5.2 and Gemini to fill in the gaps or for narrow specific uses.

GPT-5.3-Codex is restricted to Codex, so this means that for other purposes Anthropic and Claude have only extended the lead. This is the first time in a while that a model got upgraded while it was still my clear daily driver.

Claude also pulled out several other advances to their ecosystem, including fast mode, and expanding Cowork to Windows, while OpenAI gave us an app for Codex.

For fully agentic coding, GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 both look like substantial upgrades. Both sides claim they’re better, as you would expect. If you’re serious about your coding and have hard problems, you should try out both, and see what combination works [...]
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Outline:
(01:55) On Your Marks
(17:35) Official Pitches
(17:56) It Compiles
(21:42) It Exploits
(22:45) It Lets You Catch Them All
(23:16) It Does Not Get Eaten By A Grue
(24:10) It Is Overeager
(25:24) It Builds Things
(27:58) Pro Mode
(28:24) Reactions
(28:36) Positive Reactions
(42:12) Negative Reactions
(50:40) Personality Changes
(56:28) On Writing
(59:11) They Banned Prefilling
(01:00:27) A Note On System Cards In General
(01:01:34) Listen All Yall Its Sabotage
(01:05:00) The Codex of Competition
(01:06:22) The Niche of Gemini
(01:07:55) Choose Your Fighter
(01:12:17) Accelerando
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First published:

February 11th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JNjHNn3DyxaGbv8B/claude-opus-4-6-escalates-things-quickly

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Coverage of Claude Opus 4.6 started yesterday with the mundane alignment and model welfare sections of the model card.

Today covers the kinds of safety I think matter most: Sabotage, deception, situational awareness, outside red teaming and most importantly the frontier, catastrophic and existential risks. I think it was correct to release Opus 4.6 as an ASL-3 model, but the process Anthropic uses is breaking down, and it not on track to reliably get the right answer on Opus 5.

Tomorrow I’ll cover benchmarks, reactions and the holistic takeaways and practical implications. I’m still taking it all in, but it seems clear to me that Claude Opus 4.6 is the best model out there and should be your daily driver, with or without Claude Code, on most non-coding tasks, but it is not without its weaknesses, in particular in writing and falling into generating more ‘AI slop’ style prose than Claude Opus 4.5.

For coding tasks, I presume that Opus 4.6 with Claude Code is the play, especially with Agent Teams and fast mode available, and I’m using it myself, but Codex with GPT-5.3-Codex-Max is also a strong model and a viable alternative, and a fully [...]
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Outline:
(01:32) Sabotage, Deception and Evaluation Integrity
(03:42) Sandbagging On Dangerous Capability Evaluations
(06:01) Situational Awareness
(07:33) Inhibiting Evaluation Awareness (6.5)
(09:06) Self-Preference
(10:24) UK AISI Testing
(11:40) Apollo Research Testing
(14:24) Responsible Scaling Policy Evaluations
(15:45) CBRN (mostly Biology)
(18:43) Autonomy
(26:40) Autonomy Benchmarks
(29:53) Cyber
(31:27) Ship It Anyway
(33:40) You Are Not Ready
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First published:

February 10th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/togCQtFtfdF23xGNS/claude-opus-4-6-system-card-part-2-frontier-alignment

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