“AI #187: Coming Into Play” by Zvi

Opus 5.5 was released on Tuesday. I covered the system card yesterday, and will cover its capabilities soon. By all reports it is an excellent model. There are lots of fun videos going around that Opus has generated, which I will include as part of that.

OpenAI released a new cheaper and improved Sol and Luna. No one is talking about them due to Opus 5.5, but these should be an important upgrade under the hood.

Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar have formally introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. That means we get to read (RTFB) it. As always, I reserve judgment on particular bills until I can read them in detail. MIRI did so, and endorses the bill as directly confronting the extinction threat. I hope to do an RTFB soon.

I have spun two things off the weekly:

1. Coverage of the quest for the right embedded evaluators and related questions and attacks, which will become its own post.
2. Some issues related to cooperative alignment, which may get folded into the model welfare post.

I also might, in addition to a potential RTFB on the Sanders bill, do full podcast [...]

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Outline:

(01:52) On The Terms Superintelligence and 'Super Intelligence'

(03:53) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(04:26) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(05:53) Language Models Can Only Work With What You Give Them

(08:53) Huh, Upgrades

(10:42) On Your Marks

(13:16) Get My Agent On The Line

(15:53) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(17:43) Fun With Media Generation

(18:27) Copyright Confrontation

(19:07) Cyber Lack of Security

(20:04) Hugging the Face

(24:15) Hacking Into OpenAI

(28:11) They Took Our Jobs

(28:33) Get Involved

(28:41) Anthropic Has a Wet Lab and a Potential Gene Editing Technique

(34:13) Introducing

(35:11) In Other AI News

(37:08) Show Me the Money

(37:35) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

(39:02) Anthropic Approaches Recursive Self-Improvement

(45:40) Others Approach Recursive Self-Improvement

(48:56) Burden of Proof

(49:28) Quickly, There's No Time

(52:46) Left Wing Americans Really Hate AI For Different Reasons

(54:41) Chip City

(54:49) Pick Up the Phone

(55:48) The Week in Audio

(01:01:13) People Just Say Things

(01:06:07) Venkatesh Rao Stops Writing

(01:07:35) A Call for Control of Frontier AI Models

(01:11:50) Calls For Pacing The Frontier

(01:13:56) A Matter of Antitrust

(01:14:23) A Matter of Liability

(01:18:26) Quest for Sane Regulations

(01:19:20) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:24:08) Tap the Sign

(01:24:49) A Matter of Some Debate

(01:28:43) Astra Is Hard to Monitor

(01:29:14) Anticipating What a Smarter Intelligence Can Do Is Impossible

(01:34:56) Would You Look At All These Goalposts

(01:39:30) I, Robot

(01:43:13) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:44:40) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:45:50) Joe Rogan

(01:47:19) The Lighter Network Graph

(01:51:27) The Lighter Side

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First published:
September 24th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/o7pYWzWWwGDePoC5E/ai-187-coming-into-play

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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