LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

The Possessed Machines is one of the most important AI microsites. It was published anonymously by an ex- lab employee, and does not seem to have spread very far, likely at least partly due to this anonymity (e.g. there is no LessWrong discussion at the time I'm posting this). This post is my attempt to fix that.

I do not agree with everything in the piece, but I think cultural critiques of the "AGI uniparty" are vastly undersupplied and incredibly important in modeling & fixing the current trajectory.

The piece is a long but worthwhile analysis of some of the cultural and psychological failures of the AGI industry. The frame is Dostoevsky's Demons (alternatively translated The Possessed), a novel about ruin in a small provincial town. The author argues it's best read as a detailed description of earnest people causing a catastrophe by following tracks laid down by the surrounding culture that have gotten corrupted:

What I know is that Dostoevsky, looking at his own time, saw something true about how intelligent societies destroy themselves. He saw that the destruction comes from the best as well as the worst, from the idealists as well as the cynics, from the [...]

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First published:
January 25th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ppBHrfY4bA6J7pkpS/the-possessed-machines-summary

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Papal election of 1492 For over a decade, Ada Palmer, a history professor at University of Chicago (and a science-fiction writer!), struggled to teach Machiavelli. “I kept changing my approach, trying new things: which texts, what combinations, expanding how many class sessions he got…” The problem, she explains, is that “Machiavelli doesn’t unpack his contemporary examples, he assumes that you lived through it and know, so sometimes he just says things like: Some princes don’t have to work to maintain their power, like the Duke of Ferrara, period end of chapter. He doesn’t explain, so modern readers can’t get it.”

Palmer's solution was to make her students live through the run-up to the Italian Wars themselves. Her current method involves a three-week simulation of the 1492 papal election, a massive undertaking with sixty students playing historical figures, each receiving over twenty pages of unique character material, supported by twenty chroniclers and seventy volunteers. After this almost month-long pedagogical marathon, a week of analysis, and reading Machiavelli's letters, students finally encounter The Prince. By then they know the context intimately. When Machiavelli mentions the Duke of Ferrara maintaining power effortlessly, Palmer's students react viscerally. They remember Alfonso and Ippolito d’Este as [...]

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First published:
January 25th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/doADJmyy6Yhp47SJ2/ada-palmer-inventing-the-renaissance

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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This is a partial follow-up to AISLE discovered three new OpenSSL vulnerabilities from October 2025.

TL;DR: OpenSSL is among the most scrutinized and audited cryptographic libraries on the planet, underpinning encryption for most of the internet. They just announced 12 new zero-day vulnerabilities (meaning previously unknown to maintainers at time of disclosure). We at AISLE discovered all 12 using our AI system. This is a historically unusual count and the first real-world demonstration of AI-based cybersecurity at this scale. Meanwhile, curl just cancelled its bug bounty program due to a flood of AI-generated spam, even as we reported 5 genuine CVEs to them. AI is simultaneously collapsing the median ("slop") and raising the ceiling (real zero-days in critical infrastructure).

Background

We at AISLE have been building an automated AI system for deep cybersecurity discovery and remediation, sometimes operating in bug bounties under the pseudonym Giant Anteater. Our goal was to turn what used to be an elite, artisanal hacker craft into a repeatable industrial process. We do this to secure the software infrastructure of human civilization before strong AI systems become ubiquitous. Prosaically, we want to make sure we don't get hacked into oblivion the moment they come online.

[...]

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Outline:

(01:05) Background

(02:56) Fall 2025: Our first OpenSSL results

(05:59) January 2026: 12 out of 12 new vulnerabilities

(07:28) HIGH severity (1):

(08:01) MODERATE severity (1):

(08:24) LOW severity (10):

(13:10) Broader impact: curl

(17:06) The era of AI cybersecurity is here for good

(18:40) Future outlook

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First published:
January 27th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7aJwgbMEiKq5egQbd/ai-found-12-of-12-openssl-zero-days-while-curl-cancelled-its

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has written a new essay on his thoughts on AI risk of various shapes. It seems worth reading, even if just for understanding what Anthropic is likely to do in the future.

Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI

There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan's book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity's representative to meet the aliens. The international panel interviewing her asks, “If you could ask [the aliens] just one question, what would it be?” Her reply is: “I’d ask them, ‘How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?” When I think about where humanity is now with AI—about what we’re on the cusp of—my mind keeps going back to that scene, because the question is so apt for our current situation, and I wish we had the aliens’ answer to guide us. I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity [...]

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Outline:

(00:24) Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI

(15:19) 1. I'm sorry, Dave

(15:23) Autonomy risks

(28:53) Defenses

(41:17) 2. A surprising and terrible empowerment

(41:22) Misuse for destruction

(54:50) Defenses

(01:00:25) 3. The odious apparatus

(01:00:30) Misuse for seizing power

(01:13:08) Defenses

(01:19:48) 4. Player piano

(01:19:51) Economic disruption

(01:21:18) Labor market disruption

(01:33:43) Defenses

(01:37:43) Economic concentration of power

(01:40:49) Defenses

(01:43:13) 5. Black seas of infinity

(01:43:17) Indirect effects

(01:47:29) Humanity's test

(01:53:58) Footnotes

The original text contained 92 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
January 26th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kzPQohJakutbtFPcf/dario-amodei-the-adolescence-of-technology

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Audio note: this article contains 78 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.

This post covers work done by several researchers at, visitors to and collaborators of ARC, including Zihao Chen, George Robinson, David Matolcsi, Jacob Stavrianos, Jiawei Li and Michael Sklar. Thanks to Aryan Bhatt, Gabriel Wu, Jiawei Li, Lee Sharkey, Victor Lecomte and Zihao Chen for comments.

In the wake of recent debate about pragmatic versus ambitious visions for mechanistic interpretability, ARC is sharing some models we've been studying that, in spite of their tiny size, serve as challenging test cases for any ambitious interpretability vision. The models are RNNs and transformers trained to perform algorithmic tasks, and range in size from 8 to 1,408 parameters. The largest model that we believe we more-or-less fully understand has 32 parameters; the next largest model that we have put substantial effort into, but have failed to fully understand, has 432 parameters. The models are available at the AlgZoo GitHub repo.

We think that the "ambitious" side of the mechanistic interpretability community has historically underinvested in "fully understanding slightly complex [...]

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Outline:

(03:09) Mechanistic estimates as explanations

(06:16) Case study: 2nd argmax RNNs

(08:30) Hidden size 2, sequence length 2

(14:47) Hidden size 4, sequence length 3

(16:13) Hidden size 16, sequence length 10

(19:52) Conclusion

The original text contained 20 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
January 26th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x8BbjZqooS4LFXS8Z/algzoo-uninterpreted-models-with-fewer-than-1-500-parameters

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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