It seems to me that there's a strong case for audibly distinguishable sounds, and that they can't be formed by high-speed muscle movements, but I'm not convinced that they couldn't be volitional via another mechanism such as beamforming or other control of interference patterns. Humans can do overtone/throat singing with some practice, for example, and I can imagine something similar plus a click...
I've seen this message, but per our confidentiality policy, no comment. (and don't take the below as indicative either way, glomar response etc)
I will note though that Dario did not actually talk about recursive self-improvement, nor about superintelligence; commentary on Lesswrong often assumes a shared ontology that just doesn't exist.
I also continue to endorse the confidentiality policy, and per my red lines I still trust Anthropic's leadership and think the company is on net good for the world.
1Claude's Constitution just isn't designed or optimized as a "public relations" document. We do revise it in response to external reviews or criticism, but because that makes it better for the core purpose of shaping Claude's character and behavior as an alignment technique.
Claude's constitution is a living document! Opus 4.5 was trained on an earlier iteration, and we expect future models will be trained on the then-current version of this constitution.
1I standard-upvoted this at the time, and +1-review-voted more recently. I like it, as a "yes, the work continues" kind of log entry, and it's nice to be reminded that induced meiosis and superSOX were very recent very big deals. ...OK, you got me, two hours later here's a review
A neat progress update, though largely obsoleted by more recent posts (see below).
LessWrong is famously obsessed with the trainable skills and social practice of rationality, and with the prospect of very strong computer intelligence. The biological pathway to improved cognition doesn't get as much discussion, and the timelines to impact are (probably!) somewhat longer, but I remain convinced of its importance. I also strongly agree with the ethical position that
nobody’s civil rights should be in any way violated on account of their genetic code, and that reasonable precautions should be taken to make sure novel human reproductive tech is safe.
and from early 2026, it's nice to be reminded that induced meiosis and super-SOX for naive pluripotency were substantial breakthroughs! My impression is that we're still basically on track to start primate testing in the late 2020s, rather than having basically no idea if or when such things might be possible.
On the other hand, I'm substantially more optimistic than Sarah about the causal predictive power of polygenic scores - at least in principle; don't take me as endorsing any particular predictor or even current practice in general. This is supported by two key stylized facts:
- sibling genomes are independent-random when conditioned on the shared parent genomes. [1] This means that observing a phenotype-genotype correlation among siblings with a shared environment [2] really does tell us about causality.
- most genes have approximately additive effects, and interaction effects are usually small and almost always positive rather than being tradeoffs! See e.g. the heatmap here. An intuition: this is because we're only considering traits which vary between currently-living humans, which are recent enough and weakly-selected-enough that they haven't reached fixation. [3] If that didn't help, ask me in person sometime because I have more thoughts this timebox is too narrow to contain.
Finally, what's the state of the art in early 2026?
- many of my friends with young children used polygenic screening aka embryo selection. At time of writing, Herasight is a clear leader, though choice of IVF clinic etc. also matters.
- you can pretty easily do a full-genome sequence for less than $1000; at scale you could likely get the cost down to the 100-500 range, and it keeps falling over time.
- every other method involves doing something new, not just 'getting artificially lucky', and so there are a bunch of as-yet-unsolved challenges like dealing with DNA methylation and making sure all the cell markers are right - not just right-enough-to-mostly-work. This probably adds a couple of years of fiddling after the core tech works, and then extensive trials, to all the timelines below.
- iterated embryo selection would require deriving gametes from embryonic cells, which seems at least as difficult as iterated meiosis with a donor egg - and may take a few months rather than less than an hour per iteration. I think we're 3-5 years away from deriving eggs from stem cells, longer for sperm, and probably 3-5 away from induced meiosis.
- editing, especially multiplex editing, combines really nicely with iterative techniques: you can try some edits, then sequence the cell lines and keep those which worked well without off-targets. For selection-only it's harder, because you have to do the edits before the fertilized egg first divides in order to avoid mosaicism. It's on a promising trajectory for the longer term, at least.
- [another possibility omitted for reasons]
So concretely: if you want to have kids very soon talk to Herasight; if you want to have them later after-you're-30 freeze sperm or eggs (not embryos, for flexibility); if you want to get involved as a researcher or a funder send me an email. The kids are gonna be alright :-)
OK, it's actually a lot more complicated than this, but we can do fancier statistics which compensate for things like variation in the fraction of genome inherited from each parent (+/- ~4%), various constraints at particular loci (e.g. homozygous AA/BB parents will have uniformly AB, violating independence), etc. On the upside, we can also do fancier analyses where relatives outside the direct line of descent like cousins also provide (weaker) evidence about genetic effects. ↩︎
oh man this one is really tough, even if we account for birth order effects. At some level we're always conditioning on a particular environment; many of the genes we today (accurately) describe as causally contributing to autoimmune disorders were strongly advantageous during the Black Death. Some relevant parts of the environment are changing pretty fast these days though - as an example, measuring "educational attainment" by degree status will tell you something quite different about my grandparents and their grandchildren. But we will correct for what we can, and downweight what we can't; in any case this seems more challenging for cognitive traits than health and medical outcomes. ↩︎
incidentally I think it's great that modern civilization has things like "vaccines" and "enough food" and "radically lower infant mortality". 'Selection pressure' is an abstract way to describe people dying, or their children dying, etc., and I believe we can do better. As a bonus, polygenic scores are a far more sensitive and powerful optimization proceedure than variation-and-selection. ↩︎
Bluntly, this cannot possibly work.
Open-weights models will remain useful for general-purpose tasks, including in the common case where earlier context on the situation was not produced by the same model. Breaking the evidence chain is therefore sufficient, and is also easy for the attacker.
Do not confuse desirability for possibility.
I would be very happy to have this essay introduce the best-of collection, as a worked example of (6).
"Yes, obviously!"
...except that this is apparently not obvious, for example to those who recommend taking a "safety role" but not a "capabilities role" rather than an all-things-considered analysis. That's harder and often aversive, but solving a different easier problem doesn't actually help.
Note also: the last US-Russia nuclear arms-control treaty expires next week; far from neatly containing the problem we're watching an ongoing breakdown of decades-old norms. I'm worried.