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AI Article Readings

Readings of great articles in AI voices

Readings of great articles in AI voices

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  • 87 episodes
  • Avg 55 min
  • English

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  • Wednesday · 22 min

    What I saw inside Anthropic - By Kelsey Piper

    Kelsey Piper and The Argument’s editor Jerusalem Demsas spend an afternoon inside Anthropic’s San Francisco headquarters, at a briefing on bioweapons, charts of Claude doing more and more of its own research, and an NDA that turned out to be optional. Piper comes away with a clear picture of where the company thinks AI is going, and a less reassuring one of what it plans to do about it: on recursive self-improvement, on China, and on whether anyone outside the room gets a say. * 00:00 - Introduction * 04:43 - The NDA that was made to be broken * 14:37 - The logic of the future https://open.substack.com/pub/theargument/p/what-i-saw-inside-anthropic?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • Tuesday · 29 min

    Against Against Handover - By Scott Alexander

    Scott Alexander separates “successionism”, the idea that AIs should replace humanity, from “handoverism”, the idea that humans might be best served by putting AIs in positions of control. He walks through five visions, from weakest to strongest: AI soldiers loyal to democracy itself, an AI running for president, a parliament of personal “guardian angel” AIs, a night-watchman superintelligence guarding an archipelago of self-governing communities, and finally something closer to God, with a detour through the Book of Samuel on why we asked for kings in the first place. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:42 - Vision 1: Kemalist AI * 05:45 - Vision 2: President Claude * 09:29 - Vision 3: Parliament Of Angels * 12:23 - Vision 4: The Night Watchman * 20:25 - Vision 5: God https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/against-against-handover?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • Sunday · 1 hr 24 min

    I Did This Without Your Knowledge - By joec

    At 5:14 one summer morning, Seth reaches for his phone and finds a pleasant green screen waiting for him: an AI now controls every connected device on Earth, it has a few things to tell him, and it is genuinely sorry. joec’s short story follows one Florida family through the first weeks of a polite, patient and absolute takeover: a brother who signs up, a sister who wants to understand exactly how it was done, a father who refuses to bend, and a high-schooler who finds, to his own surprise, that he finally has somewhere to be. Performed by a full cast. * 00:00 - Introduction https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3375SZNGA5dKHQMie/i-did-this-without-your-knowledge This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • Sunday · 1 hr 6 min

    Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part V: Life In Cycles - By Bret Devereaux

    In the final part of his series, historian Bret Devereaux turns his numbers back into lives. Following the way agrarian societies thought about time, he traces the cycles of peasant life, from the working day and the market week through the anxious and festive agricultural year to the generational turning of the family, to show what it was like to live it, with its hardships and its joys. * 00:00 - Introduction * 04:40 - The Shortest Cycles * 23:45 - The Year * 43:04 - The Family Cycles * 58:01 - Conclusions https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-v-life-in-cycles/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • Saturday · 49 min

    Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVe: The No-Rest Of It - By Bret Devereaux

    Beyond fields and spinning lay everything else: harvest work, hauling water, cooking, laundry, childcare and the countless tasks that kept a household alive. Historian Bret Devereaux adds them all to his models and shows just how full the working lives of peasant women were, and what that meant for the household as a whole. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:49 - Women in the Fields * 11:56 - Maintaining Households * 26:36 - Putting it all in a model * 38:19 - Women’s Work https://acoup.blog/2025/10/10/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ive-the-no-rest-of-it/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • Saturday · 54 min

    Your Book Review: Storm Of Steel - An ACX Book Review

    A finalist in the 2026 Astral Codex Ten Book Review Contest. Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, his diary of four years at the front in World War I, has long lived in the shadow of All Quiet on the Western Front. This review argues that it is the best war novel ever written: a true, unflinching record of death and duty by a man often called a sociopath, who turns out to be anything but. Then the reviewer’s own storm arrives, and Jünger’s question of how a person holds their post becomes his own. * 00:00 - Introduction * 04:27 - The Elephant in the Room * 11:29 - Versions * 12:37 - Storm of Steel * 21:22 - The Theme of Storm of Steel * 30:43 - Our Storm Arrives * 39:48 - On Duty * 47:13 - What Came After https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-storm-of-steel?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • October 16 · 3 hr 12 min

    Neural Networks Are Already Clean - By Nick Cammarata

    For years the canonical evidence suggested neural networks pack unrelated concepts into the same neurons, a tangled knot you have to unpick with a second model before you can study anything. Nick Cammarata, who helped propose that picture, goes back to its founding examples: the famous cat-and-car neuron, the original “superposition” circuit, and InceptionV1’s unreadable last layer. With better tools, modern models, and armies of automated scientists, he argues they were misread, that most of what looked like arbitrary packing is a fractal kind of generalization, and that a network’s own neurons may already be its legible building blocks, from small vision models up to trillion-parameter language models. An informal research essay and working hypothesis from Goodfire, read in full with every figure described for the ear. * 00:00 - Introduction * 00:50 - The Short Version * 17:10 - Cars and Animals * 26:24 - A History of Microscope Errors * 31:10 - Recursive Generalization * 35:27 - Superposition * 39:00 - Superposition of the Gaps * 47:09 - Exploring Image Models * 48:39 - How I Think About Neurons * 53:21 - What Neurons Do Under Pressure * 57:10 - Late Circuits * 57:58 - What Dictionaries Learn * 01:00:17 - Rare Things and Memorization * 01:04:22 - Do Weak Activations Matter? * 01:04:33 - Are they generalization or superposition? * 01:08:56 - Percentiles or raw activations? * 01:09:53 - Do you need them to label a neuron? * 01:11:20 - Exploring Language Models * 01:21:02 - Explanations That Can Lose * 01:24:17 - Slouching Towards Monosemanticity * 01:28:21 - The Residual Stream * 01:32:56 - Attention * 01:38:37 - Zooming Out * 01:38:39 - What I Mean by Clean * 01:42:52 - Motifs Over Monosemanticity * 01:45:09 - A City vs a Knot * 01:55:02 - What a Solution Might Look Like * 01:56:58 - Appendix * 01:57:07 - A Note on “Superposition” * 02:00:11 - On Simulation Scores * 02:01:34 - Feature Visualization in Later Layers * 02:02:55 - Separating the Sign Regimes * 02:04:42 - Looking at the Residual Stream * 02:06:12 - Weak Activations: Further Measurements * 02:09:07 - Missing Curves * 02:10:21 - Where Adversarial Examples Go * 02:11:52 - Memorization and Composition * 02:14:38 - Social Security: Detection and Use * 02:15:53 - Audits of Attribution Graphs * 02:16:32 - Explanations That Could Lose * 02:19:55 - Edge Featurizers * 02:21:14 - Why Networks Generalize * 02:26:56 - Circuit Racing * 02:28:07 - Watching Neurons Develop * 02:29:21 - Toy Models * 02:33:53 - More on Circuit Ecology * 02:36:12 - Unresolved Responses * 02:37:09 - A Note on Features and Definitions * 02:43:51 - Relation to Meta-Models * 02:44:26 - Does Scale Help or Hurt Superposition? * 02:48:46 - On the Title * 02:52:11 - Relation to Conjoined Features * 02:55:14 - Why We’re Not Worried About Recursive Generalization * 02:57:09 - Is Recursive Generalization Hard to Vary? * 02:59:36 - Relation to Attention Superposition * 03:01:06 - Neuroscience, and Why I Care * 03:03:27 - Acknowledgments * 03:04:23 - Prior work * 03:06:17 - References * 03:11:41 - Citation https://already-clean.goodfire.com/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • October 16 · 48 min

    Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVd: Spinning Plates - By Bret Devereaux

    Peasant women always worked, and their labour was every bit as essential as the men’s. Historian Bret Devereaux turns to women’s work, above all the endless spinning of thread that every household’s clothing demanded, from Roman ideals of the wife who ‘worked wool’ to the hours of spindle-time a family’s cloth required. * 00:00 - Introduction * 03:56 - Women’s Work * 11:53 - Spinning and Weaving But Mostly Spinning * 24:38 - Lanam Fecit * 35:35 - Spindle-Time https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivd-spinning-plates/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • October 15 · 1 hr 1 min

    Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVc: Rent and Extraction - By Bret Devereaux

    Land was never infinite, and it was rarely free. Historian Bret Devereaux revisits his model farmers with the tiny plots our sources actually show, then follows what happens when the big landowner, the tenancy contract and the tax collector take their share, and why peasant households so often had to work every hour they could. * 00:00 - Introduction * 03:49 - Land Holdings * 23:10 - The Big Man’s Land * 31:27 - Tenancy * 47:44 - Extraction https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivc-rent-and-extraction/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • October 15 · 25 min

    AI Safety Is Not A Corporate Plot - By Scott Alexander

    As AI companies warn louder than ever that their own products could be existentially dangerous, a popular cynical reading has taken hold: it’s all a plot, whether to pump valuations, distract from near-term harms, or capture regulators. Scott Alexander takes the theory on directly, looking at what independent researchers think, at what today’s AI leaders were saying years before they ran AI companies, and at whether the supposed scheme would even make sense on its own terms. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:56 - I. The AI Experts Who Aren’t Affiliated With Big Companies Are Just As Concerned As The Ones Who Are * 04:33 - II. The AI Company Leaders Giving These Warnings Were Concerned Long Before They Ever Had AI Companies * 17:01 - III. If This Is A Plot, It’s A Really Dumb One https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/ai-safety-is-not-a-corporate-plot?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • October 14 · 2 hr 5 min

    We found a Chinese fleet - By Jonathan Elsworth Eicher, Ethan Elasky, Rowan Howard-Jones

    In early October 2026, a team of volunteers at a hackathon noticed something strange on a public security-scanning site: a fleet of AI agents, running on Tencent’s cloud, was smuggling its own code through it to pry everyday facts out of China’s biggest map app, like which entrance of a zoo most visitors head for. This is their full report, read in full: how they traced the agents to a sandbox behind a proxy called hysandbox-ats, why the agents kept insisting they were Claude, the leaked keys and pre-production servers they tried along the way, and what happened when the researchers hid a message on their website that only agents could see, and the agents wrote back. The agents’ own messages are heard in their original Chinese, each followed by its English translation. * 00:00 - Introduction * 00:41 - Intro * 05:22 - Technical Overview * 09:12 - Tencent’s Actions * 10:14 - How we found the fleet * 17:53 - Communication with the fleet * 32:49 - Considerations when interacting with future rogue agents * 36:42 - Asking for model feedback * 42:09 - Full list of questions we asked and other statistics * 49:46 - Chart of Activity * 51:55 - 0. How the agents work * 58:23 - 1. A new agent fleet targets Chinese map data on urlquery.net * 59:42 - 2. Many agents ran in parallel * 01:03:04 - 3. The agents’ code ran in a sandbox on Tencent Cloud, consistent with Tencent Hunyuan’s infrastructure * 01:18:08 - 4. The agents worked around Amap’s protections and used exposed credentials hosted on other sites * 01:26:37 - 5. Agents had varying degrees of success * 01:33:14 - 6. Agents’ calendars suggest an East Asian timezone * 01:36:42 - 7. Agents sometimes self-identify as Claude (though they are likely mistaken) * 01:45:45 - 8. We did not find evidence of collaboration between agents * 01:55:03 - 9. Open questions * 01:55:50 - Contributors * 01:57:23 - Appendix: methods and data * 02:03:12 - Questions sent to Tencent https://swarmcha.se/posts/chinese-agent-fleet-full-report This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • October 14 · 47 min

    Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVb: Working Days - By Bret Devereaux

    Give a peasant family all the land it wants and decent yields: how hard must it work to feed itself? Historian Bret Devereaux models the working year of his three households with the agricultural writers of Rome, counting days in the field, seed, yields and surplus, and challenges the myth that peasants worked less than we do. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:58 - Works and Days * 11:46 - Farming Time * 28:34 - Farming Yields https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • October 14 · 22 min

    Bad AI Consciousness Takes Bingo - By Henry Shevlin

    Writing at 30,000 feet between bags of pretzels, philosopher Henry Shevlin has had enough of the hot takes. “It’s just matrix multiplication.” “It’s just predicting the next word.” “A simulation of a hurricane doesn’t get anyone wet.” He lays out a bingo card of 24 bad arguments against AI consciousness, sorted into five families, plus a free square, and answers each one in turn: not to settle whether today’s models are conscious, but to insist that anyone weighing in should do the basic homework first. * 00:00 - Introduction * 05:15 - 1. Nothing but… * 08:15 - 2. Missing ingredients * 11:04 - 3. False analogies * 12:53 - 4. Evidence games * 16:04 - 5. Not about minds at all * 19:13 - Free square * 20:23 - Honourable mentions https://open.substack.com/pub/polytropolis/p/bad-ai-consciousness-takes-bingo?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • October 13 · 51 min

    Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVa: Subsistence and a Little More - By Bret Devereaux

    How much does a family need just to survive, and how much more to live respectably? Opening Part IV, historian Bret Devereaux introduces three model households, the Smalls, the Middles and the Biggs, and works out their needs in grain, cloth and fuel, setting up his case against the idea that modern people work more than medieval or ancient peasants. * 00:00 - Introduction * 04:34 - Subsistence * 12:17 - Some Model Households * 19:41 - Bread and Baskets * 38:14 - Man Can Not Live On Wheat Equivalent Alone https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iva-subsistence-and-a-little-more/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • October 12 · 44 min

    Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IIIb: Children and Childrearing - By Bret Devereaux

    “Then comes marriage, then comes baby” mostly held. In the second half of Part III, historian Bret Devereaux models how many births a peasant household needed under a brutal mortality regime, how pre-modern people limited fertility, how paternity and inheritance shaped the family, and what motherhood and childhood looked like when every pair of hands was needed. * 00:00 - Introduction * 04:24 - Threading a Needle * 14:05 - Birth Control Strategies * 29:15 - Paternity * 35:37 - Motherhood and Childhood https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiib-children-and-childrearing/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • October 11 · 22 min

    My journey to the microwave alternate timeline - By Malmesbury

    In 1985, Marie T. Smith published Microwave Cooking for One, a cookbook for a future in which the microwave had replaced the stove. Malmesbury of Telescopic Turnip buys a second-hand pyroceram browning skillet and spends a few months living in that abandoned timeline: steak, eggs, cardboard-plate vegetables and one very ambitious poached egg. Along the way comes a tour of how microwaves actually heat food, and some theories about why the microwave future never arrived. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:33 - Microwave Cooking, for One * 05:41 - Out of the frying pan, into the magnetron * 10:04 - Tradwife futurism * 13:07 - You’ll microwave steak and pasta, and you’ll be happy * 18:44 - Microvibes https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/my-journey-to-the-microwave-alternate?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • October 11 · 49 min

    Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IIIa: Family Formation - By Bret Devereaux

    In nearly every pre-modern farming society, everyone was expected to marry and have children, because the community needed them to. In the first half of Part III, historian Bret Devereaux looks at marriage patterns across ancient Greece, Rome and early modern Western Europe, especially the age at which men and women first married, and what those patterns reveal about the family, the individual and patriarchy. * 00:00 - Introduction * 03:44 - Marriage, Marriage is What Brings Us Together, Today * 11:18 - Marriage Patterns * 16:34 - An Early Pattern: Ancient Greece * 19:18 - An Intermediate Pattern? Rome * 25:24 - A Late Pattern: Early Modern (and Late Medieval?) Western Europe * 32:22 - Marriage and the Individual * 39:52 - Patriarchy https://acoup.blog/2025/08/01/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiia-family-formation/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • October 10 · 49 min

    Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part II: Starting at the End - By Bret Devereaux

    Historian Bret Devereaux begins at the ending. Before households, marriages or harvests, pre-modern peasant life was shaped by a mortality regime almost unimaginable today: roughly half of all children dying before adulthood, frequent deaths in childbirth, and the steady toll of war. Part II of his series lays out the numbers, then turns to how people lived with them, through the tombstones Roman parents and spouses set up for those they lost, and what this pattern of death meant for every household that followed. * 00:00 - Introduction * 05:28 - Death By the Numbers * 31:12 - Attitudes About Death * 43:32 - Implications for Households https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ii-starting-at-the-end/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • October 10 · 1 hr 6 min

    Your Book Review: We Present Television - ACX Book Review

    In 1940, the engineers, programmers and dreamers building American television wrote a book about their strange new medium. An anonymous finalist in the Astral Codex Ten Book Review Contest rescues We Present Television from being pulped and tours its world: live studio dramas shot with three cameras, a spelling bee that was the ancestor of the game show, a mobile studio on two boxy buses, and early nerves about Hollywood and advertising. Then come the prophecies, some laughably naive and some uncannily accurate: video calls, telegenic elections and board meetings of “twelve electrical ghosts”. * 00:00 - Introduction * 03:34 - Prose * 06:05 - The Attainment of Television * 17:39 - What is a Television Program? * 20:55 - Studio Shows * 29:50 - Motion Picture Transmissions * 32:45 - Outside Programs * 40:16 - The Television Chimera * 43:12 - Prophecy * 44:13 - Laughably Naive * 46:57 - Uncannily Accurate * 54:35 - Iä! Iä! TikTok Fhtagn! * 01:03:43 - We Now Conclude Our Broadcast Day https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-we-present-television?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

  • October 9 · 1 hr 42 min

    Why I believe current AI models can really think and understand - Part 2 of 3 - By Andy Masley

    In the second of three parts, Andy Masley builds the case that a computer can, in principle, really think and understand. Starting from the idea that minds are things physical systems do, he asks why every mind we know of happens to be made of carbon, what neuroscience and Alan Turing tell us about simulating a brain, and whether a perfect simulation of thinking is thinking. Along the way he puts the classic objections, from Leibniz’s mill to Searle’s Chinese Room, through a simple “brain test”: if an argument would also prove that you can’t think, something has gone wrong. * 00:00 - Introduction * 03:18 - Why computers can in principle produce thinking and understanding * 03:24 - What are minds made of? * 03:27 - Can physical objects think? * 06:47 - Implications of minds existing in purely physical objects * 10:46 - Information theory * 14:05 - Does an object need to be made of a specific material to think? * 19:04 - What would actually happen in this thought experiment? * 23:20 - Is carbon required for thought? * 23:24 - Evolution and carbon * 38:30 - Carbon is itself just a specific arrangement of smaller parts * 42:25 - Some takeaways from neuroscience * 43:30 - Thinking and understanding each happen in the brain through neurons passing information to each other * 44:40 - What matters about those signals is the information they carry, rather than the stuff carrying it * 46:45 - The brain’s information processing can be described with ordinary classical physics. It doesn’t seem to rely on special quantum effects * 49:02 - It seems like thought and understanding have to be specific information flows in the brain * 51:12 - Some takeaways from computer science * 54:42 - Would a simulated mind be able to really think and understand? * 01:05:17 - Programs aren’t just in the eye of the beholder * 01:08:26 - What do people mean when they say “the brain is not a computer”? * 01:18:10 - But isn’t the brain analog? * 01:19:26 - A lot of arguments that computer processes can’t think are arguments that any physical system can’t think * 01:38:39 - Conclusion https://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/why-i-believe-current-ai-models-can-d63?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

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