I tested this, and if you push Grok 4.1 to explain its claim in more detail, it'll admit that a second treaty, signed by the same delegation on the same day, includes the opium ban:

Note that Grok confabulates the name of the treaty, some of the wording, the title, and the places where it is published. 

This is also mentioned in passing in the Wikipedia article on the 1880 Angell Treaty:

The treaty was concluded along with another treaty, also negotiated by the Angell commission, that imposed restrictions on trade in opium.

Where did the phrase "you can just do things" originally come from? I see it's the name of a new book now, but it probably has been in the water supply for a few years beforehand. 

The reason The Residence isn't very popular is because of economics. A Residence flight is almost as expensive as a private charter jet.

...

Rich people should just rent low-end private jets, and poor people shouldn't buy anything more expensive than first class tickets.

I think this needs more clarification. On a per-unit basis, yes, but the upfront cost of booking a private charter jet is a lot higher since you usually can't book only 1 seat, you have to book the whole jet. 

For example, The Residence costed around $20,000-$30,000 at release (it's now more like $5,000, but the essay seems to be written with the former in mind). For a mid-range flight like UAE-Paris, you could book a charter jet for ~$75,000 that seats 10 people, which is a lot cheaper than The Residence at release, but is a bit excessive for one person. 

Tangential feature request: allow people to embed other comments in posts natively. This article uses screenshots of LessWrong to display conversations, but this does not responsively size them for mobile users and makes it harder to copy-paste stuff from this post, which a native implementation could fix.

Is this decision generally considered final and not subject to appeal, or do you expect comments on here/arguments by Said/etc to affect the final outcome you decide on?

If we have already found features/vectors for hallucinations, then why haven't major AI companies tried shifting it downwards when deploying their AIs? Does reducing their strength decrease hallucinations? Is there a reason why using it in practice would not be helpful?

This sounds like a whiteboard to me

Epoch AI's new evaluation for Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview is broken.

On their AI Benchmarking dashboard, the newest Gemini 2.5 Flash model is listed as having an accuracy of 4% ± 0.71% on GPQA Diamond, when Google's official announcement lists it at over 80%, and when GPQA is a multiple-choice test with 4 options: 

It's because of formatting issues. Helpfully, Epoch provides the logs from the evaluation, and the model just simply hasn't been responding in the correct format.

For example, if you look at the first sample from the logs, the correct answer is listed as "B", but the model answered in Latex, $\boxed{B}$, so it was scored incorrect. There are plenty of other examples like this.

"Write like you talk" depends on which language you are talking about.

Take Arabic. Written Arabic and spoken Arabic has diverged enormously compared to written English and spoken English. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the formal written language for books, newspapers, speeches etc. But no sane person speaks it. There are a lot of spoken dialects (like Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf Arabic, etc.). A speaker of different dialects may not understand other dialects or MSA, because all the vocabulary and grammar is different, which isn't usually the case in English. 

Written and spoken English are similar to each other compared to most other languages.

I've tried using a different method for r1 to generate flash fiction: one sentence at a time. If a human writer wouldn't write out a flash fiction story in one message, then AI shouldn't, either. Here's a result:

She clocked in at 6AM, categorizing discards by residue: toothpaste-crusted wedding bands in Tier 4, melatonin vials from red-eyes in Tier 7, a child’s sock curled around her sister’s garnet earring (missing since the November her calls went unanswered).

Room 312’s newlyweds left forensic poetry—dental floss strung bedpost to minibar, aspirin dust tracing slammed door trajectories. She logged these under Domestic Erosion, Subcategory: Honeymoon Phase.

Room 214’s grid collapsed at the gel insoles—mint-green, bunioned, size 6 like her sister’s. The prescription (sertraline, 50mg) was dated three days after their last fight. She filed it under Unfinished Conversations, though the label peeled halfway.

The businessman in 603 prayed, she’d assumed. But his trash betrayed her grids: glucose tabs bisecting train tickets, bloodied test strips where kneelers should’ve dented carpet. Her scrubbing split her cuticles, crimson streaking the sink’s rust.

At dawn, she assembled her relics—unopened bills, an expired birth control foil (2019’s voicemail: static, then dial tone), lint rollers furred with 603’s hair. Each strand vibrated middle C, the note her sister had looped on the piano the night she vanished.

Aspirin dust still gritted her palms. She pressed them to the window as dawn blued the glass—that bleached hue he’d called “motel dusk” while wrestling their tent zipper, his breath hot and futile against her neck.

I think that this still has some imperfections, but I find that this method at least gives you an entirely different set of problems compared to the cliché output you describe.