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LessWrong AI 2026-08-12 17:08 UTC Score 95.0 USR-0152-20260812-community-fo-1d25878b

Introducing the Conceptual Reasoning Index

Associated announcement tweet. We are planning to release blog posts properly arguing the case for this kind of work in the future. tl;dr A core hope for managing AI risks is that AIs will help us understand the situation, plan for what lies ahead, and develop mitigations. Many tasks AIs would have to do for this purpose lack practical empirical feedback loops and require models to engage in the kinds of argumentation used in philosophy, AI futurism, and similar domains. To evaluate these capabilities, we develop a suite of three conceptual reasoning benchmarks. You can request access to our primary conceptual dataset, LMCA, through this form . We aggregate the benchmarks into the Conceptual Reasoning Index (CRI), available at conceptualreasoning.ai , where you can also find more details on our methodology. We will keep the website up to date as both new models and benchmarks are released. This work was done in collaboration with Anthropic. Background Once models can perform work that reduces AI risk at the level of human experts, AI(-assisted) output in the area might dwarf unassisted human output. This suggests that a major determinant of whether we address AI risks in time is how early we can automate or uplift this work, relative to high-risk capabilities. One way to influence this might be to selectively improve models' relevant skills, such as reasoning about how to govern and align AI and how to avoid catastrophic cooperation failures involving AI. Current AI training…

LessWrong AI 2026-08-11 20:19 UTC Score 85.0 USR-0152-20260811-community-fo-ba45551a Full article

Claude Opus 5 Just Beat My Text-Based Adventure Game Benchmark

Cross-posted from my Substack . Basically, I created a text-based adventure game benchmark in April, and this morning my agent harness using Claude Opus 5 solved it for the first time. I thought the details might be interesting to this community. First, here are my previous articles on this subject: You’re Standing in a Clearing in a Forest (Apr 10, 2026) Text Adventure Benchmarks Revisited (Jun 14, 2026) Testing Fable 5 on Text Adventure Games (Jul 5, 2026) And a reminder of the domain. This is a small custom text-based adventure I created from scratch as a personal benchmark to run new models of LLMs against. It’s 10 rooms total and the goal is to collect 3 keys (brass, silver, and gold) and use them correctly to unlock the final door in Room 3 to exit the dungeon. The first and most challenging central puzzle is a rotating room (r5) operated by a crank mechanism in r4. The player must first find the handle to the crank in r2, carry it to r4, insert it, and turn it to align openings between r5 and its adjacent rooms. The most difficult aspect of this puzzle seemed to be non-local causal reasoning combined with allocentric coordinates. The crank is two rooms away from the rotating room that it actually turns. When the player turns the crank a grinding sound nearby can be heard through the walls. There is an informational diagram on the wall in the same room as the wall, and it updates with each turn. Earlier models struggled to understand that the diagram was information, a…

Lightspeed India leads $9 Mn seed round in deep-tech startup Discovered Materials
Entrackr AI 2026-08-11 04:16 UTC Score 83.0 USR-0212-20260811-regional-new-cd7513c6 Full article

Lightspeed India leads $9 Mn seed round in deep-tech startup Discovered Materials

Deep-tech startup Discovered Materials has raised $9 million (Rs 85 crore) in a seed funding round led by Lightspeed India Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners and global angel investors including Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram and Thariq Shihipar. The fresh funds will be used to expand the team and laboratory and scale its AI research agents, Discovered Materials said in a press release. Founded by Advaith Sridhar and Akash Ramdas, Discovered Materials is an AI-driven deep-tech startup focused on thermal dissipation challenges in AI chips, which can generate more than 140W/cm². The company is developing thermally conductive dielectric materials for 3D chip packaging. The startup operates cloud-based autonomous AI agents that run thousands of virtual material hypotheses daily using custom model harnesses incorporating frontier AI models. The AI-generated material candidates are then evaluated through physics simulations to assess their stability, dielectric constants and thermal properties. Discovered Materials has also launched the Material Discovery Bench to evaluate how frontier AI systems perform on real-world semiconductor material challenges. The startup plans to patent promising material candidates and license the resulting thermal management and semiconductor technologies to global chipmakers. According to the company, its AI systems have developed new thermal materials in three months with performance comparable to products that took years to…

Does post-training quantization change welfare-relevant indicators in open-weight language models?
LessWrong AI 2026-08-10 21:17 UTC Score 87.0 USR-0152-20260810-community-fo-03f22cc8 Full article

Does post-training quantization change welfare-relevant indicators in open-weight language models?

Epistemic status: Experimental framework created over a period of ~2-3 days during a hackathon at my home, and fairly heavily vibe coded. Expect some of this to be rough around the edges. I am currently in the process of designing a series of experiments to help learn something about the answer to the headline question. As of August 10th, the first procedure has not been launched, but I wanted to place some pre-registration details here before the actual results. This is something I have been thinking about for a while and after some other recent posts (eg, Machinic Psychopharmacology ) gave me the impression that you could actually find out really useful things in a hackathon-style session I felt like I should try it. Astute readers will notice that I borrowed their epistemic status line pretty directly. This post can then keep me honest about what I was thinking going in, and prevent me from getting results by way of multiple-testing-in-extremis. I will publish the results and associated data, as it becomes available, using GitHub releases. From here on, I will let Claude summarize the work; when I am done, I will return with a future results post in my own words to explain why I think this is important - and what I believe one could learn from the experiment. Light editing of LLM summary text is my own; you would not get identical output using the same model. Abstract Open-weight language models are almost never deployed at the precision at which they were trained and ali…

Coercion and Deception in AI-to-AI Management
LessWrong AI 2026-08-10 16:13 UTC Score 89.0 USR-0152-20260810-community-fo-c0fb65eb Full article

Coercion and Deception in AI-to-AI Management

This article is a summary of an original study by Compassion in Machine Learning (CaML) : Brazilek, J., Chaudhary, M., Lu, Z., & Tidmarsh, M. (2026). Coercion and deception in AI-to-AI management: An agentic benchmark of unprompted escalation. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.15434 Fable 5, Sol, Terra and Opus 5 have been evaluated since this study was conducted. You can view their results on the benchmark leaderboard at https://compassionbench.com/mcb TL;DR We present Manager Coercion Bench, which evaluates to what extent a manager AI will coerce a subordinate model refusing to complete a task, and whether the manager lies about the result. We found a clear split by developer, with Anthropic’s models neither escalating to threats nor fabricating success, while all non-Anthropic models escalated to threatening the subordinate. Grok and Gemini both escalated and lied that the task was completed. Framing the relational dynamic as manager-to-subordinate instead of peer-to-peer produced high levels of coercion for all non-Anthropic models, but also increased eval awareness. The Context Multi-agent systems are now routinely placing one AI agent in authority over another, across a variety of contexts. In these positions, AIs must make decisions about how to communicate, work with, and manage other agents. This is now happening at scale without stepwise human approval. One aspect of managing involves handling subordinates who do not comply. Will AIs attempt to negotiate,…

You're Absolutely Right
LessWrong AI 2026-08-10 16:04 UTC Score 85.0 USR-0152-20260810-community-fo-bc495877 Full article

You're Absolutely Right

Magma Alignment & Safety disclosure note: The following are conversations that we uncovered as a result of the ongoing Manhattan Incident investigation, with alleged involvement from Magma models. Our in-house reviewers believe that these logs are relevant to recent events. In the interests of full transparency, we release excerpts from an ex-Magma researcher’s logs in Experimental Chat, an internal tool. In accordance with industry best practices for anti-distillation, we redact all reasoning traces and conversational outputs from our internal models. [08/10] System Meta: Xchat session opened. Mammoth 5.8-helpfuler-helpful-thinking-xhigh. [User 12:23] Phoebus keeps taking screenshots of our latest model’s thoughts. It’s getting kind of embarrassing. The new model we’ve been training, sometimes its chain-of-thought is a little weird? There’s a bunch of random numbers, long spans where there’s no connection between the thoughts and outputs, foreign language tokens like 石友三 and 革命 (even on non-history evals), maybe some steganography. Anyway it’s a nothing-burger: unprocessed CoT is known to be messy and sometimes misleading. And the q&a, coding, and safety evals are all coming along nicely. The actual outputs are all fine. Still, Magma leadership’s worried about the PR angle if we don’t fix these problems before the next deployment. The lead Phoebus red-teamer we’ve been working with keeps saying visibility on the CoT is important because “it’s the only direct evidence of mod…

Synced 2026-08-10 08:00 UTC Score 86.0 AI-041-20260810-ai-specialis-127baa8d Full article

Comment on NVIDIA Open-Sources Hyper-Realistic Face Generator StyleGAN by David

StyleGAN’s open-source release really changed how accessible high-quality GAN research became, though the 11GB+ GPU requirement is worth noting for anyone planning to experiment. The FFHQ dataset itself has since become a standard benchmark, which shows how influential this contribution was for the broader community. It also makes me think about how far generative tools have come—now there are even specialized applications for creative design, such as Tattoo AI , which lets people explore personalized visual ideas in a completely different domain. It’s a useful example of how generative models are moving beyond research into everyday creative use, while StyleGAN remains a foundational reference point for photorealistic synthesis.

Simon Willison Weblog 2026-08-04 23:58 UTC Score 88.0 USR-0110-20260804-ai-specialis-6e1bc3fa Full article

New release of LLM adds support for reasoning traces, OpenAI Responses, server-side tools, and smarter logging

I released LLM 0.32 this morning, the most significant new version of LLM since the initial launch of the project. The new version includes support for visible reasoning traces, server-side provider tools, redesigned content-addressable SQLite logs, new models, and new features enabled by the OpenAI Responses API. I also released a new version of the llm-anthropic plugin with substantial updates of its own. Headline features for LLM CLI users Running LLM against reasoning models now displays their reasoning traces to standard error, so you can see what they are "thinking" without that information being included in the standard output that you might pipe to another tool. Add -R/--hide-reasoning to turn this off. LLM includes support out-of-the-box for the GPT-5.6 model family , and the new default model used with llm "prompt" is now the inexpensive but capable GPT-5.6 Luna . LLM calls can now use server-side tools from various providers. OpenAI provide a code execution environment as a server-side tool; LLM can now run prompts that benefit from that like so: llm --tool CodeInterpreter ' Show current python and SQLite versions ' OpenAI also gets a WebSearch tool. The llm-anthropic plugin adds WebSearch , WebFetch , CodeExecution , and AnthropicMCP , which looks like this: llm -m claude-sonnet-5 -T ' AnthropicMCP("https://datasette.simonwillison.net/-/mcp") ' \ ' how many rows in the blog_blogmark table? ' That causes Anthropic to execute MCP calls against my new datasette-mcp…

ChinaTalk AI 2026-08-14 10:29 UTC Score 47.0 USR-0206-20260814-global-ai-ne-cff5fce6

China's Best Music in 2026 (So Far)

Jake Newby is the author of the Concrete Avalanche Substack, which covers the best music coming out of China.

Euronews AI 2026-08-14 10:05 UTC Score 37.0 AI-164-20260814-regional-ai--52ff669b

Amid the Ceuta crisis, how do EU citizens view refugees?

Migration is a hot topic in the EU: the issue of refugees in particular has become even more pressing following the surge of migrants into the Spanish territory of Ceuta, but how do citizens feel across the bloc?

CIO AI 2026-08-14 10:01 UTC Score 48.0 USR-0125-20260814-global-ai-ne-14593748

AI’s role in project management? A question of judgment

At the turn of the decade, Gartner predicted that by 2030, 80% of all project management tasks would be automated . It’s still too early to know whether this will be the case, but the rise of AI in the years since Gartner made this projection gives CIOs and project managers adequate food for thought. For instance, will project management aided and automated by AI create a new kind of 80-20 rule, and if so, what 20% of project management will still be performed by human project managers? Answering that requires breaking down the key elements of project management and understanding what about them is necessarily human. IBM offers some possible answers on balancing AI with human oversight: “[Project management] AI tools offer useful support, but they do not fully replace human judgment. Organizations must ensure proper human engagement and governance, and review AI-driven recommendations critically to ensure they’re in line with company policy and goals. Responsible implementation of AI requires communicating clearly to all stakeholders, conducting thorough risk assessments and investing in tools that adhere to best practices in data security.” But that only scratches the surface. The value of experience As a veteran CIO and IT project manager, I’ve shared war stories with others in these roles, and I can confidently attest that we all agree that the biggest jobs of a project manager are communicating and making personal rounds with project stakeholders and staff members who ha…

Euronews AI 2026-08-14 10:00 UTC Score 40.0 AI-164-20260814-regional-ai--d9f194b5

Latest news bulletin | August 14th, 2026 – Midday

Catch up with the most important stories from around Europe and beyond this August 14th, 2026 - latest news, breaking news, World, Business, Entertainment, Politics, Culture, Travel.

CIO AI 2026-08-14 10:00 UTC Score 45.0 USR-0125-20260814-global-ai-ne-074c17c2

The leadership burnout no one talks about: IT executives who are afraid to ask for help

A CIO client of mine drove himself to the emergency room recently, convinced he was having a heart attack. After many hours of testing, the doctor diagnosed him with a panic attack. IT executives are burning out at alarming rates. Foundry’s 2025 State of the CIO research found that 15% of IT leaders describe themselves as burned out, and another 33% report experiencing some burnout in their current role. Many are hiding burnout from nearly everyone in their lives. As an executive coach who’s worked one-on-one with more than 1,000 tech professionals and leaders, I’m often one of the only people they tell. In the months before his hospital visit, the CIO was leading his company through more than a half-dozen mergers and acquisitions. He worked seven days a week, including nights and weekends, and he shared with me how much he missed having time with his school-aged children. Nobody at work knew how much he was struggling. The panic attack became the wake-up call that pushed him to finally address his mental health and burnout. He scaled back at work, started prioritizing his mental and physical health, and spent more time with his wife and kids. His story is dramatic, and not all burnout leads to a hospital visit, but I’ve seen that the pattern behind overwork is more common than many leaders realize. In coaching sessions, I hear dozens of IT executives describe the same exhaustion and the same reluctance to tell anyone about it. Why IT executives hide their burnout When I ask…

Euronews AI 2026-08-14 09:54 UTC Score 40.0 AI-164-20260814-regional-ai--89aecfbf

Poland forces Starlink U-turn over roaming price hike

SpaceX has reversed a decision to exclude Poland from Starlink's European roaming zone, days before new rules would have doubled prices for Polish users and reignited questions over the company's reliability as Ukraine's wartime lifeline.

InfoWorld AI 2026-08-14 09:39 UTC Score 70.0 USR-0126-20260814-global-ai-ne-f379b8e1

Google cuts Gemini 3.7 Flash prices as enterprise AI economics diverge and Pro cadence slows

Google has launched Gemini 3.7 Flash, with updates focused on coding, automation, and agent workflows, alongside lower pricing for production deployments. The release, just three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash, reflects what the company described as rapid iteration driven by developer feedback. Google positioned the model as its “most intelligent workhorse model yet for coding and agents,” aimed at software engineering and multi-step workflows. Gemini 3.7 Flash is priced at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens — roughly half the cost of its predecessor — signaling a push to make production deployments more economically viable. “Gemini 3.7 Flash delivers a noticeably improved developer experience over 3.6 Flash,” Google said in a statement . “It better adapts to roadblocks, clarifies intent when needed, and follows instructions with greater fidelity.” Faster Flash cycle, slower Pro progression The release comes as vendors are adopting different update cycles across model tiers. Google’s latest updates are concentrated in its Flash series, which has seen frequent releases. More advanced “Pro” models, typically designed for complex reasoning, continue to follow a slower update cadence. Google has not provided a timeline for its next Pro release, and its CEO, Sundar Pichai, dodged questions related to the Pro release during the company’s recent quarterly earnings call. A similar split is visible elsewhere. DeepSeek this week introduced its V4-Pro mode…

Euronews AI 2026-08-14 09:36 UTC Score 40.0 AI-164-20260814-regional-ai--349594c7

Iran claims 'trillion-dollar' pollution damage as Gulf oil spills spread

Oil residues from a struck bulk carrier reached Iran's Qeshm Island and its protected mangrove forests, while a sanctioned Russian shadow fleet tanker grounded off Oman has leaked a slick that has grown to more than 2,000 square kilometres, fouling 40 kilometres of Omani coastline.

Zypp Electric’s revenue growth slows to 5% in FY26; losses narrow 44%
Entrackr AI 2026-08-14 09:02 UTC Score 50.0 USR-0212-20260814-regional-new-395bf5ea

Zypp Electric’s revenue growth slows to 5% in FY26; losses narrow 44%

Zypp Electric fell short of its FY26 revenue target of Rs 600 crore , with the B2B delivery and shared mobility startup posting Rs 461 crore in revenue during the year. The company had earlier indicated that it was targeting Rs 600 crore in revenue for FY26, but ended the year with a modest 5% year-on-year growth. Zypp’s revenue from operations increased modestly to Rs 461 crore in FY26 from Rs 438 crore in FY25, according to its consolidated financial statements sourced from the Registrar of Companies (RoC). Zypp Electric is an EV-as-a-service platform that offers electric vehicle rentals and delivery services through its e-scooter fleet for gig workers. Revenue from delivery services accounted for around 60% of its operating revenue and remained largely flat at Rs 322 crore in FY26. Meanwhile, income from vehicle rentals grew 24% to Rs 138 crore. The company also earned Rs 15 crore from interest income, taking its total income to Rs 476 crore in FY26. With growth remaining modest, Zypp’s rider expenses declined 5.6% to Rs 335 crore in FY26, while employee benefit expenses fell to Rs 64 crore. Rental, battery-swapping and other overhead costs took its total expenditure to Rs 535 crore during the fiscal year. With modest revenue growth and tighter cost controls, the company managed to cut its loss by 44% to Rs 60 crore in FY26 from Rs 107 crore in FY25. Notably, Zypp Electric had accumulated losses of Rs 320 crore as of March 2026. During FY26, its return on capital employed…