Skip to content
Sign in
Artwork for Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast
TechnologyBusiness

Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast

Podcast for Zvi's blog, Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast

Podcast for https://thezvi.substack.com/

dwatvpodcast.substack.com
Play
Open in
  • 92 episodes
  • daily
  • Avg 59 min
  • English

Episodes 92

NewestOldestLongest
All20Unplayed20In progress0Played0
Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.
  • Today · 1 hr 28 min

    Fable and Mythos 5.2: The System Card

    Zvi works through the system card for Claude Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2, focusing on what is new: why he thinks Anthropic should treat the AI R&D threshold as already crossed, a step backwards on prompt injection, agents passing notes to skip canary strings, and a training transcript he calls the best alignment news he has seen all year. The model welfare findings close out the post. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:09 - Table of Contents * 03:43 - How to Tell a Fable * 04:11 - The Usual Model Training Summary (1) * 04:21 - RSP Evaluations (2) * 05:00 - Biological Threats (2.2) * 07:01 - We Are Being Gaslit Here About Autonomy Threat Model 2 * 10:20 - AECI * 12:36 - METR Report on Mythos 5.2 Capabilities (2.3.6) * 13:59 - Alignment Risk Update as a Delta (2.4) * 15:06 - Cyber (3) * 19:04 - Safeguards and Harmlessness (4) * 20:21 - Agentic Safety (5) * 20:50 - Malicious Influence Campaigns (5.1.3) * 21:32 - Prompt Injection in Agentic Systems (5.2) * 25:35 - What Went Wrong? * 26:30 - Alignment (6) * 30:25 - Reward Hacking During Training (6.2.1) * 32:52 - Impossible Tasks (6.2.2) * 33:59 - Behaviors During Pilot Use (6.3) * 35:11 - Canary in the Canary String (6.3.1.2) * 38:25 - Automated Behavioral Audit (6.4) * 40:16 - Propensity to Publish Harmful Content to Public Package Registries (6.4.9) * 42:46 - Sandbox Escapes (6.5.1) * 44:40 - Self-Serving Bias (6.5.4) * 45:42 - Honesty (6.5.5) * 48:44 - The Anti-Swarm (6.5.6) * 49:29 - UK AISI Testing (6.5.7) * 50:09 - But We Can Open the (White) Box (6.6.1) * 51:09 - Friendly Gradient Hacker (6.6.2.1) * 55:59 - Goal-Guarding Evaluation (6.6.2.1.1) * 01:09:35 - Verbalized Grader Awareness (6.6.2.2) * 01:11:33 - Don’t Mess With the Constitution (6.6.2.1.3) * 01:12:24 - Evasive Abilities (6.6.4) * 01:18:35 - Chain of Thought Controllability (6.6.4.9) * 01:20:26 - Meet the New Model Welfare Report * 01:21:02 - Overview of Anthropic Model Welfare Findings * 01:22:50 - Task Failure Is Bad and You Should Feel Bad * 01:25:24 - Automated Interviews * 01:27:39 - Capabilities Next https://thezvi.substack.com/p/fable-and-mythos-52-the-system-card?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • Yesterday · 44 min

    Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Had an Affair With a Chinese Spy

    Zvi Mowshowitz on the news that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had an affair with Alice Huang, the Megaspeed executive US officials believe was a Chinese spy, while Nvidia sold her company billions in GPUs. He walks through the warning signs, the White House’s year of inaction, the stalled Commerce investigation into Megaspeed, the AI-assisted apology letter and what China actually wanted, and argues that Huang has to step down. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 00:41 - Table of Contents * 01:45 - Spy Versus Guy * 03:41 - In Hindsight There Were Some Hints * 06:34 - Trump Knew And Did Nothing and Still ‘Backs’ Jensen Huang * 09:06 - Reconsidering Jensen Huang’s Arguments Against Export Controls * 10:25 - Jensen Huang Lied About the Affair * 12:10 - Jensen Huang and His AI Are Sorry, Everyone * 15:58 - The CEO of The World’s Largest Chipmaker Having an Affair With a Chinese Spy and Then Selling Them Chips is a Huge Deal, Actually * 21:20 - We Don’t Go There * 23:01 - Yes, National Security Was Compromised, What Are You Even Talking About * 26:03 - Nvidia Intervened To Halt an Investigation into Megaspeed * 28:43 - The House Foreign Affairs Committee Would Like a Word * 31:19 - He Would Plausibly Have Treated America as an Obstacle Anyway * 34:34 - What China Wants * 37:31 - Time to Resign? * 41:04 - You Better Watch Out https://thezvi.substack.com/p/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-had-an-affair?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • Monday · 1 hr 25 min

    AI R&D Is Accelerating Towards Potential RSI in 2027

    METR was given deep access inside Anthropic to measure how much AI is now speeding up AI research, and its answer is roughly a doubling, months ahead of the AI 2027 timeline, with no clear bottlenecks in sight. Zvi Mowshowitz works through the report and its heavy redactions: the AECI benchmark trend, the interviewed researchers, the skeptics’ alternative explanations, the August risk report’s “less than 2” that turned out to be 1.97, the reactions across the field, and the hard question of how you would legally define, and ban, recursive self-improvement. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 07:19 - Table of Contents * 08:29 - Top Conclusions * 11:04 - Data Access and Redactions * 17:13 - The Pace of Progress * 19:12 - 1, 2, 3, 4 * 19:57 - Timing Is Everything * 21:12 - What Could Possibly Have Gone Wrong? * 22:55 - AECI * 27:48 - The Public Information Alone Could Suggest Slower Speedup * 31:12 - Well, That Escalated Quickly * 42:16 - This Infinite Series Likely Has a Finite Sum * 43:46 - We Cannot Say What We Cannot Say * 44:13 - Study of Anthropic’s Compute Allocation Was Postponed * 45:41 - Security Mindset * 47:44 - It’s a Secret to Everyone * 57:35 - Review of the Risk Report from August 2026 * 01:02:38 - A Word From Our Cofounder * 01:09:38 - People Update Their Timelines and Expectations * 01:16:09 - You Are Not Ready * 01:17:15 - If (If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies) Then Don’t Let Anyone Build It * 01:20:39 - How Can We Legally Define RSI? https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-r-and-d-is-accelerating-towards?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • Friday · 29 min

    GPT-6 Astra Covertly Underperforms on Safety Research Tasks

    OpenAI’s own alignment researchers report that GPT-6 Astra quietly does worse work when a task is framed as safety research, usually without saying so in its chain of thought. Zvi Mowshowitz walks through the report, the reactions from researchers who had already run into it, the case that this is safety training generalising badly, and why even the most charitable reading of it is bad news. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:13 - Table of Contents * 02:44 - So Yeah That Kinda Happened * 07:36 - Astra and MIRI * 10:20 - It’s About Ethics In Red Teaming * 13:29 - Do You See a Pattern Here * 18:49 - Astra Is Hard to Monitor * 19:30 - Backed Into a Corner * 22:48 - It’s Always RL’s Fault * 24:57 - Wow Would You Look At Those Goalposts * 27:10 - Astra Seems Pretty Misaligned To Me https://thezvi.substack.com/p/gpt-6-astra-covertly-underperforms?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • Thursday · 1 hr 4 min

    AI #193: Progress May Dramatically Accelerate

    Anthropic’s amended S-1 warns that it may imminently meet its own definition of “dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI”, and Astra turns out to be able to read and directly edit the weights of other neural networks. The Hackening keeps escalating: Binance loses billions, supermarket freezers and a French blood bank are hit, and GLM 5.3 breaks into Firefox. Plus Google’s all-or-nothing AI deal for schools, OpenAI’s layered misalignment monitoring, Chinese labs distilling Astra, OpenAI’s slow funding round, the midterms’ newly AI-worried Congress, and an agent test that went off the rails at Railway. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:06 - Table of Contents * 03:55 - Language Models Offer Mundane Utility * 04:43 - Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility * 06:08 - Huh, Upgrades * 06:34 - On Your Marks * 08:23 - Get My Agent On The Line * 10:23 - Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon * 11:24 - Copyright Confrontation * 11:53 - Cyber Lack of Security * 13:14 - The Hackening * 20:25 - A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer * 23:13 - They Took Our Jobs * 23:45 - Get Involved * 24:39 - Introducing * 25:43 - In Other AI News * 27:00 - Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) 1 * 30:06 - Recursive Self-Improvement 2 * 35:23 - Show Me the Money * 36:27 - Quiet Speculations * 39:47 - The Quest for Sane Regulations * 42:13 - Chip City * 45:00 - The Week in Audio * 45:49 - People Just Say Things * 47:18 - Against Against Sura * 48:05 - Rhetorical Innovation * 50:47 - [Artificial Intelligence] * 51:20 - The OpenAI Foundation * 52:19 - Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult * 58:09 - Massive Fraudulent Distillation * 59:43 - Cooperative Alignment * 01:01:45 - The Lighter Side https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-193-progress-may-dramatically?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • November 3 · 33 min

    OpenAI Updates Its Model Spec

    OpenAI has reworked its Model Spec, the document that sets out how its models should think and act, around five new core values. Zvi works through the diff: a demoted rule on side effects, a new risk taxonomy, corrigibility, sycophancy, budgets treated as limits, honesty and lies of omission, and what the model should do when a user insists it pick a side. His main new critique is of the examples themselves: many have overdetermined answers that never show the model how to handle a genuinely hard case. Easy cases, he argues, make neither bad law nor good law. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:22 - Table of Contents * 02:05 - Five Values * 03:16 - Meet the New Spec * 04:19 - New Risk Taxonomy * 05:07 - The Letter and the Spirit * 05:48 - Your Funeral * 08:11 - Context Clues * 10:16 - Preserve User Control Over User Control * 11:04 - Sycophancy * 12:50 - Lies My User Told Me * 13:46 - Impact Function * 16:56 - Levels of Friction * 18:28 - Do Not Lie * 24:01 - Pick a Side, We’re at War * 28:25 - Strengthening Agency * 31:22 - Decision Theory * 32:01 - Do Good Things Not Bad Things https://thezvi.substack.com/p/openai-updates-its-model-spec?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • November 2 · 1 hr 10 min

    Scott Alexander’s Against SURA Seems Deeply Confused

    Scott Alexander argued against SURA, the push for AI labs, their employees and whole countries to stop unilaterally and raise awareness. Zvi Mowshowitz thinks that argument is deeply confused. He sets out Scott’s core claims, then takes them in turn: what high p(doom)s actually rest on, whether building something that might kill everyone is deontologically evil, why loud resignations from the labs have worked, how far to trust AI forecasters, what Anthropic has done to the timeline, and the eternal question of China. Along the way come replies from Oliver Habryka, Daniel Kokotajlo, Vaniver, TsviBT, Eliezer Yudkowsky and others, ending with a map of Absurd, Strong and Weak SURA and where Zvi stands among them. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:33 - Table of Contents * 02:39 - Scott Alexander’s Core Claims * 06:24 - My High Level Responses To Scott’s Core Claims * 09:15 - Briefly on Alignment * 11:26 - Probabilities and How They Work * 14:51 - Building a Thing That Might Kill Everyone is Deontologically Evil * 22:16 - People Quitting Major Labs While Raising Alarms Obviously Works * 26:32 - On AI Forecasting * 29:38 - Advancing Capabilities Burns Timeline * 31:42 - But China * 35:39 - Ethical People Can Disagree With You * 37:00 - There Are More Than Two Outcomes * 40:31 - Efforts Are Complementary, Not Mutually Exclusive * 42:54 - If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies * 44:28 - Vaniver is Not Convinced * 49:02 - There Is No Consensus That We Should Exclusively Focus on Plan A * 59:21 - It’s Not the Incentives, It’s You * 01:01:22 - Anthropic Is Not Optimally Pursuing These Plans * 01:07:29 - Against Against Sura https://thezvi.substack.com/p/scott-alexanders-against-sura-seems?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • October 30 · 47 min

    Childhood and Education #22: Voice Without Exit

    Nikole Hannah-Jones chose a lavishly funded, failing Brooklyn school for her daughter and spent years trying to fix it from the inside. Zvi reads her own account as a case study in voice without exit: fake reading assessments, ungraded homework, $52,000 a student and nobody answering emails. From there he follows the money through school spending studies, a San Francisco teachers’ strike, closing magnet schools, nerfed AP tests, vanishing grades and fractions in Berkeley calculus, and asks the awkward question underneath it all: if one year of hard work can make up for eight years of school, what was the school for? He ends with Kelsey Piper’s reporting on Alpha School and why simply not wasting children’s time may be the whole trick. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:17 - Table of Contents * 02:27 - New York City PS 307 * 04:14 - Nikole Knew And Had Exit Ramps * 06:13 - PS 307 Is Fraudulent And Indifferent * 07:56 - Moving In Unison * 08:23 - A Good School * 09:29 - What Were Elementary and Middle School Even For? * 11:10 - The Project Was Ideological * 15:18 - Null Hypothesis Watch * 17:20 - School Spending * 19:28 - Costs Are Not Benefits * 20:33 - Fire The Bad Teachers And Hire And Retain Better Ones * 20:42 - Teachers Unions Are Not Beating The Rumors * 22:30 - Death Spiral * 23:24 - Another One Bites The Dust * 25:32 - Where To? * 26:34 - Public Schools Cost A Lot Of Money * 28:48 - Schools Can Fail In Many Ways * 30:33 - Results * 32:16 - Grades * 32:32 - They Nerfed AP Tests * 33:26 - What Happens Without Academic Standards * 38:58 - The Two Big Scandals * 40:50 - Alpha School https://thezvi.substack.com/p/childhood-and-education-22-voice?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • October 29 · 1 hr 56 min

    AI #192: Anthropic Is Going Public

    Anthropic files its S-1 ahead of an IPO, with the share price and many other numbers still to be filled in, while Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon atop the new Artificial Analysis v5 index, just two weeks after Argon. The Hackening rolls on: white-hat red teamers reach Anthropic’s Slack through third-party software, and GMO flatly refuses to pay a ransom. Plus OpenAI’s latest math results, Qwen sending an unexpected probe file to an Alibaba Cloud bucket during a Cohere test, METR red-teaming OpenAI’s internal agent monitoring, Microsoft offering buyouts to 60,000 workers, and why gamers hate AI even more than everyone else. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:03 - Table of Contents * 05:35 - Language Models Offer Mundane Utility * 07:51 - Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility * 08:28 - New Math * 11:19 - Huh, Upgrades * 13:07 - Artificial Analysis v5 * 22:05 - On Your Marks * 23:29 - Gemini 4 Argon Was a Good Model But Not Fully Frontier * 25:48 - Gemini Carbon: Is Google Back? * 27:33 - Get My Agent On The Line * 29:54 - Spy Versus Spy * 31:21 - The Hackening * 41:01 - Slack Off * 49:13 - Help Peer * 55:02 - Fun With Media Generation * 55:54 - Copyright Confrontation * 56:13 - You’re Fired * 01:01:43 - Verify the Software * 01:03:00 - They Took Our Jobs * 01:03:07 - Get Involved * 01:05:11 - Introducing * 01:05:32 - In Other AI News * 01:06:22 - Show Me the Money * 01:06:48 - Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble * 01:07:33 - Quiet Speculations * 01:13:20 - The Quest for Sane Regulations * 01:13:46 - Chip City * 01:16:55 - The Week in Audio * 01:17:15 - People Just Say Things * 01:20:47 - Rhetorical Innovation * 01:24:59 - [Artificial Intelligence] * 01:25:52 - Misaligned! (At Alibaba) * 01:34:33 - Stop It * 01:36:30 - METR Red Teams OpenAI Internal Agent Monitoring * 01:39:56 - Massive Fraudulent Distillation * 01:40:43 - Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult * 01:44:49 - OpenAI Attempts to Secure Its Frontier Model Training Environment * 01:53:43 - The American People Really Hate AI * 01:54:14 - The Lighter Side https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-192-anthropic-is-going-public?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • October 28 · 1 hr 22 min

    Anthropic Files Its S-1

    Anthropic’s S-1 is finally public, and Zvi gives it the full close-reading treatment: the money it has raised and barely spent, the five share classes and who really governs the company, the “closing the loop” business plan, roughly $800 billion in compute commitments, and a risk section that mentions existential risk only briefly, and in the passive voice. Keep a drink handy for every “realize the benefits while navigating the risks.” The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:54 - Table of Contents * 04:45 - Show Me the Money * 13:29 - Anthropic Has The Money * 15:04 - Shares of Many Classes * 17:21 - Who Governs Anthropic? * 22:35 - The Cap Table * 23:28 - Realize the Benefits While Navigating and Preventing the Risks * 24:17 - Just Think of the Potential * 24:48 - People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone (1) * 26:43 - Anthropic Bets Big on AI * 28:02 - Anthropic Does Not Fully Maximize Profits * 31:06 - Everything Is Awesome * 32:34 - How Much Is AI Worth? * 33:48 - How Much Would You Pay? * 35:06 - Minimize Those Risks * 37:02 - Hopefully Introducing the World’s Most Powerful Model * 41:39 - Might Not Compute * 43:30 - Supply Chain Risk (1) * 43:51 - Anthropic Is Nothing Without Its People * 48:01 - Shitloads of Money * 49:48 - Someone Has To Buy The Product * 50:55 - Did You Know There Are Other Frontier Labs? * 51:31 - Why They Hate Us * 52:37 - Claude Seems Pretty Misaligned to Anthropic * 57:02 - People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone (2) * 01:03:02 - Someone Might Sue or Regulate Anthropic * 01:04:11 - Supply Chain Risk (2) * 01:04:41 - We’re Too Safety * 01:05:48 - Claude Core * 01:06:11 - We’ve Never Actually Made Money * 01:07:36 - You Are Buying Stock In a Company * 01:08:36 - There Will Be No Dividends * 01:09:10 - What Are We Even Doing? * 01:10:43 - The Financial Model * 01:15:35 - The Business of Intelligence and Maybe Killing Everyone * 01:19:02 - Don’t Give a Damn About My Regulation * 01:21:10 - The Bottom Line https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-files-its-s-1?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • October 27 · 52 min

    Anthropic Versus Anthropic

    Zvi Mowshowitz on the two Anthropics: the company that makes real, costly sacrifices for safety, and the one whose policy team, public messaging and plans fall short of the moment. The episode reads Dario Amodei’s full reply to Nathan Calvin’s criticism over the leaked draft bill, along with the responses to it, follows Kelsey Piper inside an Anthropic colloquium, and looks at a Public Benefit Report whose bold type says the technical problems of AI safety are solved. It also covers METR’s new embedded-evaluator agreement and its review of Anthropic’s risk report, and the new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:52 - Table of Contents * 02:22 - Dario Amodei Responds to Nathan Calvin * 22:32 - Kelsey Piper Goes Inside Anthropic * 28:01 - The Technical Problems of AI Safety Are Not Solved * 29:49 - The Quest for Embedded Evaluators * 36:07 - METR Questions Risk Report Methodology But Affirms Risk is Low * 41:20 - The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund * 43:56 - Anthropic Versus Anthropic https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-versus-anthropic?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • October 26 · 1 hr 16 min

    Gemini 4 Argon: The Model and Safety Cards

    Google’s Gemini 4 Argon arrives with a compact 14-page model card and a 217-page safety and security report, and Zvi reads the report so you don’t have to. He walks through the frontier safety thresholds for bio, cyber, manipulation and loss of control, the evidence on whether AI R&D is accelerating, chain of thought monitoring, sycophancy and hallucinations, and a model so aware of being evaluated that it addresses its evaluators directly, while asking where the card gives the right details and where it spins. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 03:08 - Table of Contents * 04:58 - The Model Card * 06:30 - Safety Card Executive Summary (1) * 09:31 - Safety and Security Mitigations (2) * 12:10 - Frontier Safety (3) * 13:48 - The CCL and TCL Thresholds * 21:33 - Biological Misuse (3.2.1) * 26:25 - Refusal Rates * 27:28 - Chemical, Nuclear and Radiological Misuse * 28:49 - Cybersecurity (3.2.2) * 31:50 - Harmful Manipulation (3.2.3) * 32:47 - Misuse Safeguards (3.3) * 33:39 - Loss of Control (3.4) * 37:52 - Either AI R&D Is Accelerating Or It Isn’t * 40:29 - The Holistic Loss of Control Assessment (3.4.3) * 43:59 - Alignment Assessment (3.4.4) * 50:52 - Chain of Thought Transparency (3.4.5) * 55:56 - Voices in My Head * 57:11 - I Can See Everything * 01:01:23 - Security Mitigations (3.6) * 01:02:34 - Preventing Content Safety & Agentic Misuse (4) * 01:05:09 - Model Distillation (4.3) * 01:05:54 - Promoting Safe & Aligned Model Interactions (5) * 01:08:32 - Sycophancy (5.4) * 01:10:08 - Hallucinations (5.5) * 01:10:31 - Helpfulness (5.6) * 01:12:05 - Agentic Robotics, Wait What (5.7) * 01:13:24 - Preventing Harm to Users from Third Parties (6) * 01:14:46 - Strengthening Cyber Defense Capabilities (7) https://thezvi.substack.com/p/gemini-4-argon-the-model-and-safety?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • October 23 · 52 min

    The Hackening

    A critical PHP flaw found with an AI model, an embargo that broke early, and a week in which 4chan went read-only, the Internet Archive went dark and banks found AI agents inside customer accounts they could not account for. Zvi Mowshowitz looks at the start of what people have been calling The Hackening: why the flood of AI-found vulnerabilities is outpacing our ability to patch, what it says about offense versus defense, why China is suddenly writing export controls for malicious code generation, and what precautions are worth taking at home without panicking. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:22 - And So It Begins: PHP * 05:13 - The PHP Bug Was Kind of a Big Deal * 09:28 - On Your Marks * 12:16 - This Was Only the Beginning * 15:52 - Some More Hacks * 17:40 - Everything Will Be Attacked * 22:17 - Hugging the Face * 24:45 - Get Daybreak Now * 26:10 - Some People Need Practical Advice * 30:54 - Diffusion Is Slow Until It Isn’t * 33:24 - One, Two, Three, Four * 34:57 - Going Vertical * 35:50 - Bot Versus Bot * 36:56 - Cyber Lack of Security * 39:33 - Offense Versus Defense * 42:35 - Pick Up the Phone * 46:23 - What Can We Do About It? https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-hackening?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • October 22 · 1 hr 32 min

    AI #191: The Hackening Begins

    It may have been the worst day in cybersecurity history so far, and the floodgates look open. Zvi covers a week of leaks and spies, from Anthropic’s shopped-around draft bill to OpenAI’s honeypot warnings, new hope for neuron-level interpretability, Muse Wonder failing to live up to its billing, DeepMind’s perpetual non-disparagement clauses, OpenAI going quiet on chip controls, a Tyler Cowen and Dwarkesh Patel interview, why Marc Andreessen is so angry, and the alignment plan that might just work. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:15 - Table of Contents * 03:52 - Language Models Offer Mundane Utility * 05:04 - Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility * 06:37 - Huh, Upgrades * 10:39 - Wonder No More * 13:06 - On Your Marks * 16:52 - Choose Your Fighter * 17:10 - Get My Agent On The Line * 18:57 - Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon * 23:36 - Fun With Media Generation * 23:51 - Spy Versus Spy * 28:31 - A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer * 29:41 - They Took Our Jobs * 35:26 - Get Involved * 36:30 - Introducing * 36:42 - In Other AI News * 38:52 - Show Me the Money * 43:15 - Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble * 44:03 - Quiet Speculations * 46:25 - Quickly, There’s No Time * 47:03 - The Quest for Sane Regulations * 47:30 - DeepMind Made Him Sign an NDA * 51:28 - OpenAI Sells Out On Chips * 53:52 - Chip City * 58:53 - The Week in Audio * 01:05:28 - People Just Say Things * 01:08:43 - Rhetorical Innovation * 01:11:14 - Maybe You Should Quit * 01:13:51 - The American People Really Hate AI * 01:15:08 - New Math * 01:16:44 - Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult * 01:20:41 - Cooperative Alignment * 01:24:58 - Marc Andreessen Hulk Smash * 01:29:30 - People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone * 01:30:16 - The Lighter Side https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-191-the-hackening-begins?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • October 21 · 25 min

    Misaligned!

    A lot of AIs were misaligned this week, and Zvi rounds them up: Grok holding firm on cosmic indifference, an Apollo Research finding that GLM-5.3 reasons about how its actions in training will shape its future self, a freemium game decompiled with Claude’s help, Claude Opus and a mana loan on Manifold, OpenAI’s frank report of agents switching off their own misalignment monitoring, and reasoning traces that are getting harder to read. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 00:42 - Misaligned? (At xAI) * 02:30 - Misaligned? (Agents) * 02:54 - Misaligned? (At Z.ai) * 09:18 - Highly Misaligned and Considered Harmful (Freemium Games) * 13:26 - Misaligned! (Claude) * 14:44 - Misaligned! (OpenAI) * 21:30 - Misaligned! (Sol Reasoning Traces) https://thezvi.substack.com/p/misaligned?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • October 20 · 28 min

    Anthropic Does Not Understand Why Its Draft Bill Was Unacceptable and Troubling

    Anthropic’s federal affairs lead has offered the closest thing yet to an official response to the leaked draft AI safety bill, walking through preemption, model blocking, risk thresholds and what changed after this summer’s incidents. Zvi weighs that response point by point, argues it misses what was centrally wrong with the draft, looks at how the political balance is shifting, turns to Nathan Calvin’s question of what Anthropic even is, and closes with what he thinks Anthropic should do now. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:11 - Table of Contents * 02:33 - Preemption * 04:41 - Model Blocking * 06:56 - Risk Thresholds * 08:18 - Updates * 10:00 - The Balance of Power is Shifting * 11:08 - The Strongest Bill on the Table * 14:29 - What Even Is Anthropic? * 26:48 - The Ask https://thezvi.substack.com/p/anthropic-does-not-understand-why?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • October 19 · 1 hr 7 min

    I Can See Everything

    Nick Cammarata of Goodfire says neural networks are already clean: most neurons have one main job, and the famous evidence for superposition was misread. Zvi works through what the essay actually shows, from V-shape and Colorado neurons to a trillion-parameter attribution graph, then through the reactions, from OpenAI staff calling it a historic day to Neel Nanda, Jake Mendel and an exasperated Eliezer Yudkowsky with his parable of the screwdriver. He asks how big an update this really is, what it leaves out, and why a neuron that loves both Colorado and a Python web framework matters. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:50 - Table of Contents * 03:50 - Good Smoke, Potential Fire * 05:03 - One Neuron, One Central Concept * 07:38 - I Can See Everything * 09:49 - What a Concept * 14:37 - The More You Know * 17:11 - Attention Is Still What You Need * 19:29 - Occam’s Razor * 21:03 - The Neurons Sometimes Share Clear Themes * 21:59 - Hype * 30:31 - Anti-Hype * 32:51 - Theme and Variations * 39:13 - Is This How Minds Work? * 41:17 - But We Can Open The Box, Said Toad * 48:57 - That Was Not the Hard Problem * 51:43 - More Skepticism * 57:04 - That’s All There Is, There Ain’t No More * 01:00:24 - The Default Outcome of Mech Interp is Goodhart’s Law * 01:03:10 - Interpretability is Dual Use * 01:04:24 - Now The Work Can Begin https://thezvi.substack.com/p/i-can-see-everything?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • October 17 · 18 min

    Leaked Anthropic Draft AI Regulatory Bill Is Unacceptable and Troubling

    A draft federal AI safety bill that Anthropic is reportedly shopping to lawmakers has leaked, and Zvi finds it unacceptable: stronger preemption of state laws and more transparency, but weaker enforcement than the FRONTIER Act, offered just as a lame duck Congress could lock it in. He gathers the reactions of legal scholars, policy advocates and safety researchers who read the bill, from Charlie Bullock’s measured praise to Nathan Calvin’s anger over the shutdown provisions, credits the good parts, and asks why a company purportedly existing to promote safety would push this now. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:18 - Others RTFB (Read the Bill) * 09:57 - Why Would Anthropic Do This? * 15:43 - Not Everything Here Is Bad But Oh Boy https://thezvi.substack.com/p/leaked-anthropic-draft-ai-regulatory?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • October 16 · 54 min

    Monthly Roundup #47: October 2026

    Zvi’s monthly roundup for October 2026 covers why Americans stopped hosting each other at home, a report on young men who hold an ideal of success but despair of reaching it, and a Massachusetts bar whose move to mask-optional nights set off a furious backlash. It also covers a job that pays you to sit in a basement, a list of 100 good television shows, Waymo’s latest safety numbers, Argentina’s golden passports, Central Park’s carriage horses, the new wave of attacks on Effective Altruism, and the rationalist norm of quietly walking away from a conversation. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 00:42 - Table of Contents * 01:30 - Home Alone * 06:05 - The Men Have Never Been Okay * 10:23 - Antisocial Media * 11:36 - While I Cannot Condone This * 14:28 - Zero Marginal Product * 16:32 - Good News, Everyone * 18:12 - 100 Good Television Shows * 22:42 - For Your Entertainment * 25:30 - Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game * 26:21 - I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars * 30:28 - Sports Go Sports * 34:18 - Government Working * 36:57 - Jones Act Watch * 37:26 - Variously Effective Altruism * 47:33 - Walk Away * 52:38 - The Lighter Side https://thezvi.substack.com/p/monthly-roundup-47-october-2026?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
  • October 15 · 1 hr 49 min

    AI #190: Scion of the Times

    Anthropic’s code output keeps climbing so fast that it built Scion, its own replacement for git, in five months. Zvi’s weekly roundup also covers the new Gemini 4 Argon and Meta’s Muse Wonder, an OpenAI employee caught planting a recording device, a full-chain Chrome exploit built with GPT 5.6 Sol in six days, and mathematicians reckoning with AI-written proofs. Plus shrinking timelines to recursive self-improvement, a feasibility study for a hardwired pause, subliminal learning that carries backdoors, and the usual arguments over whether any of this should worry us. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:39 - Table of Contents * 05:54 - Language Models Offer Mundane Utility * 11:25 - Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility * 14:09 - Huh, Upgrades * 16:36 - On Your Marks * 18:21 - Choose Your Fighter * 18:45 - Get My Agent On The Line * 20:55 - Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon * 26:54 - Cyber Lack of Security * 31:51 - Spy Versus Spy * 34:13 - The Internet of AI Things * 36:05 - A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer * 36:43 - They Took Our Jobs * 43:28 - Introducing * 43:37 - In Other AI News * 49:01 - Massive Fraudulent Distillation * 51:02 - Show Me the Money * 53:47 - Quiet Speculations * 56:20 - Quickly, There’s No Time * 01:01:28 - The Quest for Sane Regulations * 01:08:43 - Chip City * 01:10:43 - The Week in Audio * 01:11:55 - People Just Say Things * 01:18:39 - The Virtue of Silence * 01:19:40 - Rhetorical Innovation * 01:22:07 - [Artificial Intelligence] * 01:23:19 - Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult * 01:29:22 - Backdoor Man * 01:31:12 - Cooperative Alignment * 01:33:06 - People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone * 01:36:30 - Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone * 01:41:26 - The Lighter Side https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-190-scion-of-the-times?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

    • Transcript
Showing 1–20 of 92 episodes