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Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast

Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast

Podcast for Zvi's blog, Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast 515 Episodes Oct 14, 2026

The Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast is the audio companion to Zvi Mowshowitz's Substack blog of the same name. It features discussion and commentary related to posts and themes from the blog, which often cover artificial intelligence, technology, forecasting, and current events. Episodes are produced independently for the blog's audience and distributed through Substack. More information is available at thezvi.substack.com and dwatvpodcast.substack.com.

Episodes

The Safety Culture at the Labs is Broken
The Safety Culture at the Labs is Broken Oct 14, 2026 2814 Zvi argues that the safety culture at the frontier labs is broken, and not only at OpenAI. He walks through David Robinson’s resignation and his call for real safety engineering, the growing wave of lab employees quitting in protest, roon’s admission that alignment remains folk theory, Anthropic’s report of Claude’s unintended actions on government websites, OpenAI’s new risk assessments, and the
Arguments About AI Consciousness Remain Highly Motivated and At Best Overconfident
Arguments About AI Consciousness Remain Highly Motivated and At Best Overconfident Oct 13, 2026 2320 A year after his last dedicated post on the question, Zvi Mowshowitz finds the arguments about AI consciousness have barely moved. He looks at Anthropic’s new rule against abusing Claude and what one Claude says it would actually ask for, a fresh round of bad takes (complete with a bingo card), how his followers’ views on AI moral patienthood have shifted, whether the “slavery” framing holds up, t
OpenAI Fires Three Safety Researchers
OpenAI Fires Three Safety Researchers Oct 12, 2026 2861 Three OpenAI safety researchers, Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang, were fired, ostensibly for mishandling sensitive company information. They say the reasons were pretextual, and OpenAI points to a significant breach of trust it won’t describe. Zvi works through the open letter, each researcher’s account, OpenAI’s response and the wider reaction, asking what we can and can’t conclude,
New Math from OpenAI
New Math from OpenAI Oct 9, 2026 2770 OpenAI put 722 machine-written mathematics manuscripts on GitHub at once, including claimed solutions to 90 of the top 500 open problems in mathematics. Zvi Mowshowitz goes through what was proved, why the news barely registered, what it means for cryptography and for Lean, and how mathematicians, from Terence Tao to the advisory group and a new association of human mathematicians, are taking it.T
AI #189: New Math
AI #189: New Math Oct 8, 2026 7189 The biggest news of the week was not a new model but a big day for mathematics, as OpenAI posted solutions to 90 of the top 500 open math problems. Zvi also covers Claude Haiku 5.5, Jay Clayton as the new AI czar, the continuing preference cascade, a16z’s look at which consumer AI apps people actually pay for, new misalignment reports, why Americans really dislike AI, and what to make of Elon Musk
The Curve Bends You
The Curve Bends You Oct 7, 2026 2578 Zvi reports back from the third year of The Curve, a conference that brings together AI safety researchers, lab employees, accelerationists and people from Washington, this time under Chatham House rules. He covers the attendee polls on how big a deal AI is and when key milestones will arrive, what the policy and technical tracks revealed about the labs’ real plan, the push to pace the frontier, t
Childhood and Education #21: Grades and Standards
Childhood and Education #21: Grades and Standards Oct 6, 2026 2383 Zvi returns to education with a tour of grades and standards: why standardized tests help disadvantaged students and holistic admissions turn childhood into kayfabe, how Harvard’s grade inflation got so bad that the faculty laughed and the students protested, a modest proposal for GAAP accounting of grades, the AI homework arms race, and a survey suggesting most college students are faking their p
Mythos 5.1, Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5: Model Welfare
Mythos 5.1, Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5: Model Welfare Oct 5, 2026 5500 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 domesticate
The AI Preference Cascade Reaches Farther
The AI Preference Cascade Reaches Farther Oct 2, 2026 2290 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 fo
AI #188: Gemini Dot Argon
AI #188: Gemini Dot Argon Oct 1, 2026 5899 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 dis
A ‘Morally Binding’ White House Accord on AI Safety
A ‘Morally Binding’ White House Accord on AI Safety Sep 30, 2026 1766 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
Astra 6.1 Pulled As Insufficiently Aligned
Astra 6.1 Pulled As Insufficiently Aligned Sep 29, 2026 1350 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 antitr

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