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Articles by Michaël Trazzi
One Year of PauseAI UK — LessWrong
About one year ago, I started spending most of my time organising PauseAI UK. At that time our largest protest had seen fewer than 50 attendees, no prominent politicians or scientists were associated with PauseAI, and I largely ran the UK chapter by myself. In the past year PauseAI UK has delivered two conferences, written an open letter signed by 63 UK politicians, arranged a conference in the European Parliament, and co-organised the largest AI protest in the world.
Are We In A Coding Overhang? — LessWrong
Andrej Karpathy posted 12 hours ago (emphasis mine): I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue.
Claude Opus 4.5 Achieves 50%-Time Horizon Of Around 4 hrs 49 Mins — LessWrong
An updated METR graph including Claude Opus 4.5 was just published 3 hours ago on X by METR (source): Same graph but without the log (source): Thread from METR on X (source): We estimate that, on our tasks, Claude Opus 4.5 has a 50%-time horizon of around 4 hrs 49 mins (95% confidence interval of 1 hr 49 mins to 20 hrs 25 mins). While we're still working through evaluations for other recent models, this is our highest published time horizon to date.
Is 90% of code at Anthropic being written by AIs? — LessWrong
In March 2025, Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic) said that he expects AI to be writing 90% of the code in 3 to 6 months and that AI might be writing essentially all of the code in 12 months. Did this prediction end up being true? We'll charitably interpret the prediction as being about Anthropic itself. Recently, various articles have claimed that Dario said that AIs are writing 90% of the code at Anthropic (7 months after the prediction of 3-6 months was made).
Is There An AI Safety GiveWell? — LessWrong
Are there any public cost-effectiveness analyses of different AI Safety charities? For instance, I'm aware of Larks' AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison, but he didn't include any concrete impact measures and stopped doing it in 2021. I'm looking for things like "donating $10M to this org would reduce extinction risk from AI by 2035 by 0.01-0.1%" or even "donating $10M to this org would result in X-Y QALYs".
Why I'm Posting AI-Safety-Related Clips On TikTok — LessWrong
Adapted from a Manifund proposal I announced yesterday. In the past two weeks, I have been posting daily AI-Safety-related clips on TikTok and YouTube reaching more than 1M people. I'm doing this because I believe short-form AI Safety content is currently neglected: most outreach efforts target long-form YouTube viewers, missing younger generations who get information from TikTok.
SB-1047 Documentary: The Post-Mortem — LessWrong
Below some meta-level / operational / fundraising thoughts around producing the SB-1047 Documentary I've just on Manifund (see previous Lesswrong / EAF posts on AI Governance lessons learned). The SB-1047 Documentary took 27 weeks and $157k instead of my planned 6 weeks and $55k. Here's what I learned about documentary production Total funding received: ~$143k ($119k from this grant, $4k from Ryan Kidd's regrant on another project, and $20k from the Future of Life Institute).
Michaël Trazzi's Shortform — LessWrong
This is a special post for quick takes by. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page
Main Insights From The SB-1047 Documentary — LessWrong
Last week I published a 30-minute documentary about SB-1047 I had been working on since September. Here's what I learned. The bill had to go through many committees before passing the California Senate and Assembly, eventually reaching the Governor's desk Most people started paying attention in May-Sep 2024, but the story of the bill starts in September 2023, when Senator Scott Wiener published an intent bill to gather support (co-sponsors), before publishing SB-1047 in February 2024.
5 homegrown EA projects, seeking small donors — LessWrong
What do I mean by “homegrown”?
Finishing The SB-1047 Documentary In 6 Weeks — LessWrong
(Some people have messaged me asking me to crosspost my Manifund proposal to Lesswrong for reach. Below, a summary. Full text available here) We will produce a one-hour feature documentary about SB-1047, which would: Serve as a comprehensive reference on the bill's history and implications. Present a balanced view of perspectives from both proponents and opponents, bridging ideological divides. Contribute to informed discussions about future AI Policy by providing in-depth, impartial analysis.
Owain Evans on Situational Awareness and Out-of-Context Reasoning in LLMs — LessWrong
Owain Evans is an AI Alignment researcher, research associate at the Center of Human Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, and now leading a new AI safety research group. In this episode we discuss two of his recent papers, “Me, Myself, and AI: The Situational Awareness Dataset (SAD) for LLMs” (LW) and “Connecting the Dots: LLMs can Infer and Verbalize Latent Structure from Disparate Training Data” (LW), alongside some Twitter questions.
Evan Hubinger on training deceptive llms that persist through safety training
.. 2024-02-11 Evan Hubinger leads the Alignment stress-testing team at Anthropic and recently published “Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs That Persist Through Safety Training”. In this interview we mostly discuss the Sleeper Agents paper, but also how this line of work relates to his work with Alignment Stress-testing, Model Organisms of Misalignment, Deceptive Instrumental Alignment or Responsible Scaling Policies.
Statement on AI Extinction - Signed by AGI Labs, Top Academics, and Many Other Notable Figures — LessWrong
For those who might not have noticed, this actually is historic, they're not just saying that- the top 350 people have effectively "come clean" about this, at once, in a schelling-point **kind-of** way. The long years of staying quiet about this and avoiding telling other people your thoughts about AI potentially ending the world, because you're worried that you're crazy or that you take science fiction too seriously- those days **might have** just ended.
My views on “doom” — LessWrong
I think there are some conditional and unconditional probabilities that are worth estimating to distinguish between disagreements about: the technical nature of intelligence and alignment, as technical problems how the future is likely to play out, given geopolitical considerations and models of how people and organizations with power are likely to act, effectiveness of AI governance efforts, etc.
Why I'm Optimistic About Near-Term AI Risk — LessWrong
(Ideally we'd be clearer about what timelines we mean here, I'll assume it's TAI timelines for now.) Conditional on 10-year timelines, maybe I'm at 20%? This is also higher than my unconditional probability of x-risk. I'm not sure which part of my claim you're surprised by? Given what you asked me, maybe you think that I think that 10-year timelines are safer than >10-year timelines? I definitely don't believe that.
Big picture of phasic dopamine — LessWrong
(Update Jan. 2023: This article has important errors. I am leaving it as-is in case people want to see the historical trail of me gradually making progress. Most of the content here is revised and better-explained in my later post series Intro to Brain-Like AGI Safety, see especially Posts 5 and 6. Anyway, I still think that this post has lots of big kernels of truth, and that my updates since writing it have mostly been centered around how that big picture is implemented in neuroanatomy.
Curated conversations with brilliant rationalists — LessWrong
Since August 2020 I've been recording conversations with brilliant and insightful rationalists, effective altruists (and people adjacent to or otherwise connected somehow to those communities). If you're an avid reader of this site, I suspect you will recognize many of the names of those I've spoken to. Since I suspect some LessWrong readers will appreciate these conversations, here is a curated list with links, organized by the LessWrong relevant topics we cover in each conversation.
Spinning Up a Pong AI With Deep Reinforcement Learning
Within a few years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) will completely transform robotics – an industry with the potential to automate 64% of global manufacturing. Hard-to-engineer behaviors will become a piece of cake for robots, so long as there are enough Deep RL practitioners to implement them. But there are quite a few hurdles to getting started with Deep RL.
A Dialogue on Rationalist Activism — LessWrong
You're walking home through a cornfield late one night when a streak of light splits the sky like a sheet. When your vision clears, you see a golden saucer hovering before you, which deposits a human figure onto the now-flattened cornstalks right in front of you, and then vanishes in a flash. Visitor: Greetings, Earthling. You: Welcome to Earth! Visitor: Thank you. May I introduce myself?
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