"Deep learning as program synthesis" by Zach Furman

After five months of me (Buck) being slow at finishing up the editing on this, we’re finally putting out our inaugural Redwood Research podcast. I think it came out pretty well—we discussed a bunch of interesting and underdiscussed topics and I’m glad to have a public record of a bunch of stuff about our history. Tell your friends! Whether we do another one depends on how useful people find this one. You can watch on Youtube here, or as a Substack podcast. Notes on editing the podcast with Claude Code (Buck wrote this section) After the recording, we faced a problem. We had four hours of footage from our three cameras. We wanted it to snazzily cut between shots depending on who was talking. But I don’t truly in my heart believe that it's that important for the video editing to be that good, and I don’t really like the idea of paying a video editor. But I also don’t want to edit the four hours of video myself. And it seemed to me that video editing software was generally not optimized for the kind of editing I wanted to do here (especially automatically cutting between different shots according [...] ---Outline:(00:43) Notes on editing the podcast with Claude Code(03:11) Podcast transcript --- First published: January 4th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p4iJpumHt6Ay9KnXT/the-inaugural-redwood-research-podcast --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This post was originally published on November 11th, 2025. I've been spending some time reworking and cleaning up the Inkhaven posts I'm most proud of, and completed the process for this one today. Today, Canada officially lost its measles elimination status. Measles was previously declared eliminated in Canada in 1998, but countries lose that status after 12 months of continuous transmission. Here are some articles about the the fact that we have lost our measles elimination status: CBC, BBC, New York Times, Toronto Life. You can see some chatter on Reddit about it if you're interested here. None of the above texts seemed to me to be focused on the actual thing that caused Canada to lose its measles elimination status, which is the rampant spread of measles among old-order religious communities, particularly the Mennonites. (Mennonites are basically, like, Amish-lite. Amish people can marry into Mennonite communities if they want a more laid-back lifestyle, but the reverse is not allowed. Similarly, old-order Mennonites can marry into less traditionally-minded Mennonite communities, but the reverse is not allowed.) The Reddit comments that made this point are generally not highly upvoted[1], and this was certainly not a central point in any of [...] ---Outline:(03:20) The Mennonite Outbreak(06:58) Mennonite Geography(11:47) Mennonites Are Susceptible To Facts and Logic, When Presented In Low German The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: January 25th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/H8RdAbAmsqbpBWoDd/canada-lost-its-measles-elimination-status-because-we-don-t --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

Audio note: this article contains 73 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Epistemic status: This post is a synthesis of ideas that are, in my experience, widespread among researchers at frontier labs and in mechanistic interpretability, but rarely written down comprehensively in one place - different communities tend to know different pieces of evidence. The core hypothesis - that deep learning is performing something like tractable program synthesis - is not original to me (even to me, the ideas are ~3 years old), and I suspect it has been arrived at independently many times. (See the appendix on related work). This is also far from finished research - more a snapshot of a hypothesis that seems increasingly hard to avoid, and a case for why formalization is worth pursuing. I discuss the key barriers and how tools like singular learning theory might address them towards the end of the post. Thanks to Dan Murfet, Jesse Hoogland, Max Hennick, and Rumi Salazar for feedback on this post. Sam Altman: Why does unsupervised learning work? Dan Selsam: Compression. So, the ideal intelligence [...] ---Outline:(02:31) Background(09:06) Looking inside(09:09) Grokking(16:04) Vision circuits(22:37) The hypothesis(26:04) Why this isnt enough(27:22) Indirect evidence(32:44) The paradox of approximation(38:34) The paradox of generalization(45:44) The paradox of convergence(51:46) The path forward(53:20) The representation problem(58:38) The search problem(01:07:20) Appendix(01:07:23) Related work The original text contained 14 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: January 20th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Dw8mskAvBX37MxvXo/deep-learning-as-program-synthesis-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

Fiora Sunshine's post, Why I Transitioned: A Case Study (the OP) articulates a valuable theory for why some MtFs transition. If you are MtF and feel the post describes you, I believe you. However, many statements from the post are wrong or overly broad. My claims: There is evidence of a biological basis for trans identity. Twin studies are a good way to see this.   Fiora claims that trans people's apparent lack of introspective clarity may be evidence of deception. But trans people are incentivized not to attempt to share accurate answers to "why do you really want to transition?". This is the Trans Double Bind.   I am a counterexample to Fiora's theory. I was an adolescent social outcast weeb but did not transition. I spent 14 years actualizing as a man, then transitioned at 31 only after becoming crippled by dysphoria. My example shows that Fiora's phenotype can co-occur with or mask medically significant dysphoria. A. Biologically Transgender In the OP, Fiora presents the "body-map theory" under the umbrella of "arcane neuro-psychological phenomena", and then dismisses medical theories because the body-map theory doesn't fit her friend group. The body-map theory is a straw man for [...] ---Outline:(00:29) My claims:(01:17) A. Biologically Transgender(02:38) Twin Studies à la LLM(06:06) B. The Trans Double Bind(07:10) Motivations to transition(11:53) Introspective Clarity(13:23) C. In the Case of Quinoa Marisa(19:44) Conclusion The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: January 19th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rt2yai8JkTPYgzoEj/why-i-transitioned-a-response --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Read the constitution. Previously: 'soul document' discussion here. We're publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It's a detailed description of Anthropic's vision for Claude's values and behavior; a holistic document that explains the context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be. The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content directly shapes Claude's behavior. Training models is a difficult task, and Claude's outputs might not always adhere to the constitution's ideals. But we think that the way the new constitution is written—with a thorough explanation of our intentions and the reasons behind them—makes it more likely to cultivate good values during training. In this post, we describe what we've included in the new constitution and some of the considerations that informed our approach. We're releasing Claude's constitution in full under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Deed, meaning it can be freely used by anyone for any purpose without asking for permission. What is Claude's Constitution? Claude's constitution is the foundational document that both expresses and shapes who Claude is. It contains detailed explanations of the values we [...] ---Outline:(01:14) What is Claudes Constitution?(03:26) Our new approach to Claudes Constitution(04:59) A brief summary of the new constitution(09:14) Conclusion The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: January 21st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mLvxxoNjDqDHBAo6K/claude-s-new-constitution --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post. It is unbearable to not be consuming. All through the house is nothing but silence. The need inside of me is not an ache, it is caustic, sour, the burning desire to be distracted, to be listening, watching, scrolling. Some of the time I think I’m happy. I think this is very good. I go to the park and lie on a blanket in a sun with a book and a notebook. I watch the blades of grass and the kids and the dogs and the butterflies and I’m so happy to be free. Then there are the nights. The dark silence is so oppressive, so all-consuming. One lonely night, early on, I bike to a space where I had sometimes felt welcome, and thought I might again. “What are you doing here?” the people ask. “I’m three days into my month of digital minimalism and I’m so bored, I just wanted to be around people.” No one really wants to be around me. Okay. One of the guys had a previous life as a digital minimalism coach. “The first two weeks are the hardest,” he tells me encouragingly. “Two WEEKS?” I want to shriek. [...] --- First published: January 18th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eeFqTjmZ8kS7S5tpg/the-first-two-weeks-are-the-hardest-my-first-digital Linkpost URL:https://mingyuan.substack.com/p/the-first-two-weeks-are-the-hardest --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I spent a few hundred dollars on Anthropic API credits and let Claude individually research every current US congressperson's position on AI. This is a summary of my findings. Disclaimer: Summarizing people's beliefs is hard and inherently subjective and noisy. Likewise, US politicians change their opinions on things constantly so it's hard to know what's up-to-date. Also, I vibe-coded a lot of this. Methodology I used Claude Sonnet 4.5 with web search to research every congressperson's public statements on AI, then used GPT-4o to score each politician on how "AGI-pilled" they are, how concerned they are about existential risk, and how focused they are on US-China AI competition. I plotted these scores against GovTrack ideology data to search for any partisan splits. 1. AGI awareness is not partisan and not widespread Few members of Congress have public statements taking AGI seriously. For those that do, the difference is not in political ideology. If we simply plot the AGI-pilled score vs the ideology score, we observe no obvious partisan split. There are 151 congresspeople who Claude could not find substantial quotes about AI from. These members are not included on this plot or any of the plots which follow. [...] ---Outline:(00:46) Methodology(01:12) 1. AGI awareness is not partisan and not widespread(01:56) 2. Existential risk is partisan at the tails(02:51) 3. Both parties are fixated on China(04:02) 4. Who in Congress is feeling the AGI?(11:10) 5. Those who know the technology fear it.(12:54) Appendix: How to use this data The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: January 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLdcvAcoFZv9enR37/what-washington-says-about-agi --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

Since artificial superintelligence has never existed, claims that it poses a serious risk of global catastrophe can be easy to dismiss as fearmongering. Yet many of the specific worries about such systems are not free-floating fantasies but extensions of patterns we already see. This essay examines thirteen distinct ways artificial superintelligence could go wrong and, for each, pairs the abstract failure mode with concrete precedents where a similar pattern has already caused serious harm. By assembling a broad cross-domain catalog of such precedents, I aim to show that concerns about artificial superintelligence track recurring failure modes in our world. This essay is also an experiment in writing with extensive assistance from artificial intelligence, producing work I couldn’t have written without it. That a current system can help articulate a case for the catastrophic potential of its own lineage is itself a significant fact; we have already left the realm of speculative fiction and begun to build the very agents that constitute the risk. On a personal note, this collaboration with artificial intelligence is part of my effort to rebuild the intellectual life that my stroke disrupted and hopefully push it beyond where it stood before. Section 1: Power Asymmetry [...] --- First published: January 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kLvhBSwjWD9wjejWn/precedents-for-the-unprecedented-historical-analogies-for-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Boaz Barak, Gabriel Wu, Jeremy Chen, Manas Joglekar [Linkposting from the OpenAI alignment blog, where we post more speculative/technical/informal results and thoughts on safety and alignment.] TL;DR We go into more details and some follow up results from our paper on confessions (see the original blog post). We give deeper analysis of the impact of training, as well as some preliminary comparisons to chain of thought monitoring. We have recently published a new paper on confessions, along with an accompanying blog post. Here, we want to share with the research community some of the reasons why we are excited about confessions as a direction of safety, as well as some of its limitations. This blog post will be a bit more informal and speculative, so please see the paper for the full results. The notion of “goodness” for the response of an LLM to a user prompt is inherently complex and multi-dimensional, and involves factors such as correctness, completeness, honesty, style, and more. When we optimize responses using a reward model as a proxy for “goodness” in reinforcement learning, models sometimes learn to “hack” this proxy and output an answer that only “looks good” to it (because [...] ---Outline:(08:19) Impact of training(12:32) Comparing with chain-of-thought monitoring(14:05) Confessions can increase monitorability(15:44) Using high compute to improve alignment(16:49) Acknowledgements --- First published: January 14th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k4FjAzJwvYjFbCTKn/why-we-are-excited-about-confession --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

Two cats fighting for control over my backyard appear to have settled on a particular chain-link fence as the delineation between their territories. This suggests that: Animals are capable of recognizing Schelling points Therefore, Schelling points do not depend on language for their Schelling-ness Therefore, tacit bargaining should be understood not as a special case of bargaining where communication happens to be restricted, but rather as the norm from which the exceptional case of explicit bargaining is derived. Summary of cat situation I don't have any pets, so my backyard is terra nullius according to Cat Law. This situation is unstable, as there are several outdoor cats in the neighborhood who would like to claim it. Our two contenders are Tabby Cat, who lives on the other side of the waist-high chain-link fence marking the back edge of my lot, and Tuxedo Cat, who lives in the place next-door to me. | || Tabby's || yard || (A) |------+...........+--------| (B) || | Tuxedo's| My yard | yard| ||| -- tall wooden fences.... short chain-link fence In the first [...] ---Outline:(00:43) Summary of cat situation(03:28) Why the fence?(04:00) If animals have Schelling points, then... --- First published: January 14th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uYr8pba7TqaPpszX5/backyard-cat-fight-shows-schelling-points-preexist-language --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.