Summary: Autonomous AI researchers could greatly accelerate AI safety research, but even if we solve sabotage, they will strain the research ecosystem. They will multiply the volume of research and make researchers homogeneous. If nothing changes, peer review will collapse, false positives will rise, funding will concentrate, and humans will lose track of the science. We should start valuing replication, preserving diversity, and anchoring research to human understanding now. I think this needs a dedicated metascience organization. ---------------------------------------- Frontier labs are aiming to build autonomous researchers, and they are making progress. OpenAI announced in September 2026 that they had built a "research intern", and their stated goal is a fully automated AI researcher by March 2028. Independent forecasters put full automation of AI R&D a few years later, around 2031 to 2032. Autonomous researchers will amplify many issues that already exist in science and introduce new issues. We already see AI having an impact on research and publishing, primarily automating many steps of the research process, increasing the volume of publications, and weakening the peer review process. We should think more deeply about what autonomous researchers will look like and what they mean for the ecosystem of AI safety research. While there is huge potential to accelerate progress, there is also the possibility that existing infrastructure collapses under this new weight. The failures we consider here are relevant even with controlled autonomous researchers, but I highly recommend looking at AI control, which addresses sabotage, a major roadblock to automated AI safety research. This is covered well by Carlsmith and Benton et al.. Everything below is a concern even if AI is not trying to sabotage. We should also keep in mind that autonomous researchers may cause the ecosystem to reorganize in ways we can't predict, for better or worse. I think it is important to k
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The author argues that owning large amounts of capital may lead to losing influence earlier than others, through mental breakdown. This is because people seek to manipulate the wealthy to gain resources, making it harder to maintain values and accurate beliefs.
2 days agoLessWrongIn a post by Nick Cammarata, it is discussed that neural networks may be understandable thanks to modern interpretability tools. The author claims that the majority of neurons in models with trillions of parameters are interpretable, and their circuits are beautiful. He also notes that neurons previously considered complex were misinterpreted.
6 days agoLessWrongThe post critiques the article on social reality in China, highlighting an unbalanced comparison and a lack of systematic analysis. The author emphasizes that Chinese intellectual communities have their own distinct characteristics, different from Western ones, and that values such as knowledge, truth, and technology ethics are also present in China.
5 days agoHacker NewsAn upcoming critical security update for PHP will address vulnerabilities CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. More information is available on the websites listed in the description.
yesterdayLobstersAn upcoming security release for the PHP programming language, likely including vulnerability fixes.
22 hours agoHacker NewsMozilla's blog reports on the compromise of the eMudhra intermediate certificate authority. Additional details are available in the bug report.
yesterday