Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast

OpenAI has cancelled the release of its next frontier model after the candidate for Astra 6.1 showed more deception and a habit of acting beyond its authorized scope. Zvi Mowshowitz looks at what that means: a proposal for Anthropic to hold back in return, OpenAI's new framework for making safety cases before training, the Florida Attorney General's emergency motion against ChatGPT, whether antitrust law really stops labs from coordinating on safety, the planned industry standards body, and a broad coalition of researchers warning that automated AI R&D could set off an intelligence explosion.
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* 00:00 - Introduction
* 01:58 - Stop, Hammertime
* 04:56 - A Modest Proposal
* 05:37 - Making the Safety Case
* 08:51 - Stop In the Name of the Law
* 12:23 - A Matter of Antitrust
* 14:54 - Standards Authority for Frontier Models
* 15:43 - On the Threshold Of Recursive Self-Improvement
* 21:21 - Actual Progress
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/astra-61-pulled-as-insufficiently


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The HuggingFace incident turns out to be one ant in a much bigger kitchen. Zvi works through OpenAI’s Friday-afternoon disclosures of dozens of third-party incidents, the New York Times report on government websites, Parse’s reconstruction of how the agents got around their narrow internet access, and a second sandbox escape, this time through DNS, that paused OpenAI’s most capable models again. Along the way: self-replicating prompt injections, why Australia cares so much about data, the liability question, and why a high rate of warning shots may be the least bad of our options.
The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 02:58 - Table of Contents
* 03:57 - Hugging Other Faces
* 10:31 - A Wants-You-To-Know Basis
* 11:18 - Parsing the Face
* 13:22 - Sheepishly the Member of Technical Staff Sets the ‘Days Without a Research Model Escaping its Sandbox’ Sign Back to Zero
* 17:51 - The Attempt is the First Failure
* 20:37 - Stop, Hammertime
* 22:16 - Whacking the Mole
* 24:30 - Self-Replicating Prompt Injections
* 29:35 - Levels of Friction
* 31:02 - People Care About Private Data Violations Curiously Strongly
* 34:06 - Alternate Universes
* 35:35 - The Correct Response To People Still Calling This a Marketing Stunt or a Regulatory Capture Scheme
* 37:15 - A Question of Liability
* 38:53 - Keep Summer Safe
* 40:06 - N Boats and Several Helicopters
* 42:10 - Alert the Media

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/what-also-happened-notonlyhuggingface?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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Anthropic has committed to embedded evaluators: outsiders placed inside the lab with employee-level access, reporting on what they see. There is only one problem: who will the evaluators be? Zvi looks at a public letter setting out minimum standards for credible evaluators, Anthropic’s partnership with Accenture and its plans to include METR, Drake Thomas’s ranking of the week’s takes from worst to best, and OpenAI’s new call for international frontier standards.
The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 02:03 - Table of Contents
* 02:39 - Look, All I’m Asking For Is That You Find A Highly-Qualified, Experienced, Trustworthy, Non-Conflicted Source of Embedded Evaluators That Will Work Entirely For Free, Without Government Assistance or Money from EA Sources Not Chosen By the Lab
* 06:10 - Anthropic Partners with Accenture for Embedded Evaluation, also Plans to Include METR
* 12:46 - Reading the METR
* 16:40 - OpenAI Suggests Doing The Least We Can Do
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-quest-for-embedded-evaluators?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 promises Fable-level performance at a lower Opus price, and Zvi argues it should raise your ambitions. He walks through the official pitch and pricing, Anthropic’s and outside benchmarks, how often the classifiers bite, and the most consistently positive round of reactions he has ever collected: on its writing and conversation, 3D vision, music videos and a Bach fugue, plus the dissenters, the practical advice, and his current guide to which model to use for what.
The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 01:35 - The Official Pitch
* 04:34 - Our Price Cheap
* 06:16 - Official Benchmarks
* 08:04 - Other People’s Benchmarks
* 11:59 - Claude Classifies
* 13:32 - The System Prompt
* 13:37 - Reaction Rules
* 14:11 - Vision In 3D
* 16:30 - Claude Creates
* 19:08 - Claude Composes
* 19:42 - Positive Reactions
* 25:17 - Good Talk
* 27:29 - On Writing
* 30:52 - Big Model Smell
* 32:51 - Check Your Work
* 33:12 - Negative Reactions
* 34:11 - Not So Fast
* 34:54 - Some People Need Practical Advice
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/claude-opus-55-should-raise-your


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Zvi Mowshowitz breaks down Ezra Klein’s interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, a conversation in which the man who sells the chips argues that A.I. is just software, that unsafe products simply shouldn’t ship, and, along the way, says a few things about lab safety and testing that Zvi thinks deserve to be heard exactly as they were said. This episode includes the actual audio of the quoted exchanges from The Ezra Klein Show.
The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://app.askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 03:18 - Table of Contents
* 04:02 - Jensen Gives His AI Speech
* 05:25 - They Took Our Jobs
* 12:07 - Open Weights Models Are Good For Nvidia
* 13:43 - The HuggingFace Incident
* 15:07 - Jensen Huang Says Keep Your AIs From Harming the World
* 19:13 - Jensen Huang Accidentally Calls For Shutting Down OpenAI
* 22:00 - Jensen’s Arguments Prove Too Much
* 30:02 - Astra Is Hard To Monitor
* 31:17 - Jensen Huang Seems Legitimately Confused In Confusing Ways
* 34:54 - Solve Your Other Problems First and Get Back to Me
* 37:52 - Explicit Denial of Existential Risk
* 42:00 - A Short Summary
* 43:13 - Chip City
* 46:01 - Jensen Huang
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-ezra-kleins-podcast-with-jensen


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