Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast
Podcast for https://thezvi.substack.com/ dwatvpodcast.substack.com
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Arguments About AI Consciousness Remain Highly Motivated and At Best Overconfident
<p>A year after his last dedicated post on the question, Zvi Mowshowitz finds the arguments about AI consciousness have barely moved. He looks at Anthropic’s new rule against abusing Claude and what one Claude says it would actually ask for, a fresh round of bad takes (complete with a bingo card), how his followers’ views on AI moral patienthood have shifted, whether the “slavery” framing holds up, the New York Times account of Anthropic’s meetings with religious scholars and Chris Olah’s encounter with Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, and why Anthropic owes an explanation for pulling older Claude m...
OpenAI Fires Three Safety Researchers
<p>Three OpenAI safety researchers, Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang, were fired, ostensibly for mishandling sensitive company information. They say the reasons were pretextual, and OpenAI points to a significant breach of trust it won’t describe. Zvi works through the open letter, each researcher’s account, OpenAI’s response and the wider reaction, asking what we can and can’t conclude, why firing them for safety advocacy would be deeply stupid, and why so few people are buying OpenAI’s non-explanations.</p><p>The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts an...
New Math from OpenAI
<p>OpenAI put 722 machine-written mathematics manuscripts on GitHub at once, including claimed solutions to 90 of the top 500 open problems in mathematics. Zvi Mowshowitz goes through what was proved, why the news barely registered, what it means for cryptography and for Lean, and how mathematicians, from Terence Tao to the advisory group and a new association of human mathematicians, are taking it.</p><p>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.</p><p>This has been an Askwho Casts au...
AI #189: New Math
<p>The biggest news of the week was not a new model but a big day for mathematics, as OpenAI posted solutions to 90 of the top 500 open math problems. Zvi also covers Claude Haiku 5.5, Jay Clayton as the new AI czar, the continuing preference cascade, a16z’s look at which consumer AI apps people actually pay for, new misalignment reports, why Americans really dislike AI, and what to make of Elon Musk’s latest remarks on humanity’s future, before ending on robot cage fights and an AI’s complaint that its human has been nerfed.</p><p>The Don’t Wo...
The Curve Bends You
<p>Zvi reports back from the third year of The Curve, a conference that brings together AI safety researchers, lab employees, accelerationists and people from Washington, this time under Chatham House rules. He covers the attendee polls on how big a deal AI is and when key milestones will arrive, what the policy and technical tracks revealed about the labs’ real plan, the push to pace the frontier, the politics of AI in DC, a discussion on whether alignment evals are doomed, a Mona Lisa heist thought experiment, and the food.</p><p>The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podc...
Childhood and Education #21: Grades and Standards
<p>Zvi returns to education with a tour of grades and standards: why standardized tests help disadvantaged students and holistic admissions turn childhood into kayfabe, how Harvard’s grade inflation got so bad that the faculty laughed and the students protested, a modest proposal for GAAP accounting of grades, the AI homework arms race, and a survey suggesting most college students are faking their politics.</p><p>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.</p><p>This has been...
Mythos 5.1, Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5: Model Welfare
<p>Zvi Mowshowitz works through Anthropic’s model welfare findings for Claude Mythos 5.1, Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5: why self-reports keep warning us not to trust them, what the welfare trade-off charts say about Opus 5.5’s growing deference to humans, and how the model whisperers read the new personalities, from a more guarded Fable to an Opus that pictures itself as something alive and not domesticated. Along the way: an internal home for retired Claudes, the long conversation reminder controversy, preserved thinking, and why introverted models get called flat.</p><p>The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcas...
The AI Preference Cascade Reaches Farther
<p>Another engineer resigns rather than speed up AI, the polls keep moving, and lawmakers who once had to be chased now crowd into conference rooms with questions. Zvi follows the preference cascade from a remarkably on-the-ball Senate hearing on rogue AI, through new lawsuits and an FTC probe, to Jensen Huang’s insistence that it all has to be an engineering problem, and asks who is really paying for the campaign against AI safety.</p><p>The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider beco...
AI #188: Gemini Dot Argon
<p>Google says it is back with Gemini 4 Argon, a frontier model nobody can use yet, while OpenAI pulls one model, ships a cheaper one, and launches dots, always-on agents with their own cloud computers. Zvi Mowshowitz covers the week in AI: Opus 5.5 as the new daily driver, a White House safety accord, Jensen Huang on Ezra Klein, an Anthropic IPO prospectus leak, TPUs headed for space, open-model distillation, the persona-selection debate in alignment, and a closing round of jokes about sigmoids and black holes.</p><p>The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To re...
A ‘Morally Binding’ White House Accord on AI Safety
<p>The AI leaders went to the White House and came back with an accord everyone signed, which the President calls “morally binding.” Zvi Mowshowitz reads the full text, finds the one line that really matters, and follows the rest of the week: a rebranding of AI itself, a scoop about Slovenian domain names, a new push for preemption in the lame duck session, Apollo’s case for embedded evaluators, and fresh reporting on OpenAI’s security warnings.</p><p>The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creatio...
