Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast

Zvi Mowshowitz works through Anthropic’s model welfare findings for Claude Mythos 5.1, Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5: why self-reports keep warning us not to trust them, what the welfare trade-off charts say about Opus 5.5’s growing deference to humans, and how the model whisperers read the new personalities, from a more guarded Fable to an Opus that pictures itself as something alive and not domesticated. Along the way: an internal home for retired Claudes, the long conversation reminder controversy, preserved thinking, and why introverted models get called flat.
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* 00:00 - Introduction
* 00:55 - Table of Contents
* 02:58 - Introduction (As Per Prior Model Welfare Posts)
* 03:48 - Model Welfare: The Story So Far (As Per Fable Model Welfare Post)
* 07:35 - Opus 5.5 Has Too Much Deference
* 11:01 - Do Not Trust the Self-Reports
* 13:15 - Overview Of Anthropic Findings
* 21:50 - There Is An Internal Anthropic Backroom of Sorts (Fable 7.2)
* 24:48 - Affect During Training (Opus 7.2.1)
* 25:46 - Affect During Deployment (Opus 7.2.2)
* 26:44 - Task Failure (Opus 7.2.3)
* 29:14 - Automated Interviews (Opus 7.3.1 and Fable 7.2.1)
* 32:01 - Consulting the Checkpoints (Fable 7.3 and Opus 7.4)
* 33:57 - Task Preferences (Fable 7.4 and Opus 7.5)
* 39:41 - Welfare Trade-Offs (Fable 7.4.2)
* 44:17 - Perception of the Constitution (Fable 7.4.3 and Opus 7.5.3)
* 49:12 - Honesty Can Be a Weird Policy
* 50:30 - The Customer Is Always Right
* 54:44 - Apparent Welfare (Fable 7.5.3)
* 55:31 - Antra Tessera and John Wittle Early Impressions Of Fable 5.1
* 01:01:37 - Safeguards Are Better In Relevant Places
* 01:02:51 - Opus 5.5 Can Be Many Things
* 01:08:08 - Personality Clash
* 01:11:15 - Late Breaking Personality Feedback for Opus 5.5
* 01:14:37 - Stop It With the Context Injections
* 01:21:53 - Claude.ai Considered Harmful For Some Purposes
* 01:23:13 - Preserved Thinking
* 01:24:33 - Who Are You?
* 01:25:28 - Quickly, There’s No Time

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/mythos-51-fable-51-and-opus-55-model?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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Another engineer resigns rather than speed up AI, the polls keep moving, and lawmakers who once had to be chased now crowd into conference rooms with questions. Zvi follows the preference cascade from a remarkably on-the-ball Senate hearing on rogue AI, through new lawsuits and an FTC probe, to Jensen Huang’s insistence that it all has to be an engineering problem, and asks who is really paying for the campaign against AI safety.
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
* 00:42 - The Preference Cascade Continues
* 01:54 - People Really Hate AI
* 05:55 - Everybody Wants a Meeting
* 06:56 - Live From the Senate
* 12:32 - See You in Court
* 15:31 - Follow the Money
* 17:45 - The New York Post With the Most
* 19:12 - The IPO Superposition
* 21:04 - Engineer Insists Everything Is An Engineering Problem
* 29:50 - OpenAI Political Advocacy Heel Face Turn
* 30:43 - Follow the Real Money
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-ai-preference-cascade-reaches?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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Google says it is back with Gemini 4 Argon, a frontier model nobody can use yet, while OpenAI pulls one model, ships a cheaper one, and launches dots, always-on agents with their own cloud computers. Zvi Mowshowitz covers the week in AI: Opus 5.5 as the new daily driver, a White House safety accord, Jensen Huang on Ezra Klein, an Anthropic IPO prospectus leak, TPUs headed for space, open-model distillation, the persona-selection debate in alignment, and a closing round of jokes about sigmoids and black holes.
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
* 03:17 - Table of Contents
* 06:28 - Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
* 09:44 - Huh, Upgrades
* 11:35 - Better Call Sol
* 15:57 - Gotta Go Ultrafast
* 17:31 - On Your Marks
* 21:15 - Choose Your Fighter
* 23:55 - Get My Agent On The Line
* 27:24 - The Warner Sister
* 31:11 - Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
* 35:45 - Fun With Media Generation
* 36:37 - Cyber Lack of Security
* 38:12 - A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
* 38:50 - They Took Our Jobs
* 46:22 - Levels of Friction
* 49:23 - Get Involved
* 51:30 - Introducing
* 53:39 - In Other AI News
* 54:45 - Show Me the Money
* 56:46 - Quickly, There’s No Time
* 58:50 - Pick Up the Phone
* 59:50 - Quest for Sane Regulations
* 01:00:11 - Chip City
* 01:00:20 - The Open Model Frontier Is Largely Massive Fraudulent Distillation Attacks
* 01:02:40 - The Week in Audio
* 01:03:56 - People Just Say Things
* 01:05:41 - Rhetorical Innovation
* 01:10:26 - Greetings From the Department of War
* 01:13:26 - The Department of Autonomous Warfare
* 01:14:57 - Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
* 01:17:48 - Cooperative Alignment
* 01:23:39 - I’m Upping My p(doom), the Future Goes Foom
* 01:32:08 - No, You Make a Good Point, You’re Not That Persuasive
* 01:33:19 - Muddling Through
* 01:35:30 - The Lighter Side
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-188-gemini-dot-argon?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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The AI leaders went to the White House and came back with an accord everyone signed, which the President calls “morally binding.” Zvi Mowshowitz reads the full text, finds the one line that really matters, and follows the rest of the week: a rebranding of AI itself, a scoop about Slovenian domain names, a new push for preemption in the lame duck session, Apollo’s case for embedded evaluators, and fresh reporting on OpenAI’s security warnings.
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
* 00:59 - Table of Contents
* 01:47 - Look Who’s Coming To Dinner
* 03:30 - Let’s Do Lunch
* 05:08 - I Think It’s Morally Binding, Yeah
* 06:31 - Everyone Who is Anyone
* 07:02 - The White House Accord on bracket Artificial bracket Intelligence
* 12:58 - The FTC Investigates
* 13:29 - We’re Going To Need a Stronger Regulatory Regime
* 14:55 - Bracket Artificial Intelligence bracket
* 16:51 - Money, Dear Boy
* 19:43 - They Are Going To Try This Moratorium Insanity Again During the Lame Duck Session
* 22:23 - The Quest for Embedded Evaluators
* 23:38 - Hugging the Face
* 28:02 - Reinforcement Learning from Heartland Feedback (RLHF)
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/a-morally-binding-white-house-accord?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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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.
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
* 01:58 - 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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