Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

techcrunch.com

131–140 of 504 posts

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#131
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure if it can ever be possible. i can ask chatGPT to do stylography analysis on our comments, find our other accounts and go from there. I'm pretty sure most pieces of human-generated data is identifiable at this point

This is not how it works, (unless of course you're pretending and collecting all these 'auxiliary data' on purpose) and even if it was, there's still plenty of non-PII data around

It would be really interesting to raise a human only on non-PII data and see exactly how screwed up and weird they'd be.

The Golem-Class model behaves in a 'humanlike' manner because it's trained on actual real data like we'd experience in the world. What you're suggesting is some insane psychology test that we'd never allow to happen to a human.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#132
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an argument, but I don’t buy it. Models are a commodity. You don’t get VC valuations and returns from raising $5B for a grain startup. The application of AI to business problems will be lucrative, but the models are just a tool and the money will come from the domain-specific data (i.e. user and business data), which Microsoft, Google, and even Meta are positioned for. Having a slightly better model but no cus…

I don't think the grain market is growing as fast as the AI market

Don’t confuse the ai market with the foundational llm model market.

Think of LLMs as the understanding component in the brain, once you can understand instructions and what actions need to happen from those instruction you’re done.

The rest is integrations, the arms legs and eyes of langchain. Then memory and knowledge from semantic search, vector databases and input token limits.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#133
post #83
post #3

4 years ?!? That’s like a century in AI-dog years. Who knows how the world will be by then.

AI seems to progress in bursts, and I think we're in the middle of one, but it may be naive to think the progress will continue at the same pace for another 4 years. When Big Blue beat Kasparov in Chess in 1997, I wonder if anyone would've guessed that it'd take almost 20 years for a computer to beat a master in Go. IBM Watson was launched in 2010 and had many of the same promises as GPT. It supposedly fell flat in m…

Given the field's record of AI winters, it would be naive to think progress will certainly continue, but given the amount of progress that has been made as well as how it's being made, it would also be naive to think it will certainly not.

The advances that have come in the last few years have been driven first and foremost by compute and secondarily by methodology. The compute can continue to scale for another couple orders of magnitude. It's possible that we'll be bottlenecked by methodology; there are certain things that current networks are simply incapable of, like learning from instructions and incorporating that knowledge into their weights. That said, one of the amazing things about recent successes is that the precise methodology doesn't seem to matter so much. Diffusion is great, but autoregressive image generation models like Parti also generate nice images, albeit at a higher computational cost. RL from human feedback achieves impressive results, but chain of hindsight (supposedly) achieves similar results without RL. It's entirely plausible to me that the remaining challenges on the path to AGI can be solved by obvious ideas + engineering + scaling + data from the internet.

We've also gotten to the point where AI systems can make substantial contributions to engineering more powerful AI systems, and maybe soon, to ideation. We haven't yet figured out how to extract all of the productivity gains from the systems we already have, and next-generation systems will provide larger productivity gains, even if they are just scaled up versions of current-generation systems.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#134
post #110
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may have been a disagreement, but now they're focused on profit, as everybody else. From the same article: “Anthropic has been heavily focused on research for the first year and a half of its existence, but we have been convinced of the necessity of commercialization, which we fully committed to in September [2022],” the pitch deck reads. “We’ve developed a strategy for go-to-market and initial product speciali…

This is hilarious to me, in that the disgruntled departure just did a 180… how long until the next disgruntled spin-out for higher reasons chases the dollar too…

> This is hilarious to me, in that the disgruntled departure just did a 180… how long until the next disgruntled spin-out for higher reasons chases the dollar too…

The cynic in me wants to ask "What makes you think his departure was because of an anti-commercialisation position?"

My take (probably just as wrong as everybody's else take) is that he saw the huge commercialisation potential and realised that he could make even more money by having a larger stake, which he got when he started his own venture.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#135
post #37

AI models are in a race to the bottom and everybody inside Anthropic knows it. Besides OpenAI, with billions to spend plus a partnership with MS, there's also Google, Apple, Meta and Amazon who can afford to run losses on AI for years without blinking an eye. And if that wasn't enough the Open Source world is releasing new models almost weekly now, for free. Anthropic is putting on a big show to convince gullible inv…

It all depends on if they're in the business of producing the whitepapers that drive ML advancements in the first place. AI is far from a solved problem and whoever gets to it first wins. We have GPT because of a billion dollars worth of data, not algorithms.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#136
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason why companies don't allow NSFW content is because of puritan payment processors that see that stuff and then go absolute sicko mode and lock people out of the traditional finance system.

This comment right here can be shown to snobs who still denounce crypto btw

Taking all payment in Ethereum doesn't matter when you have to pay for servers and domain names in fiat.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s needs to be some difficult barriers to entry beyond having the money to spend on training FLOPS in order for a startup to compete. I have no idea if there are or there aren’t, but that’s the big question.

I mean, this is just the beginning. Just wait till we get actual scifi robots in the next year or so. FWIW, I do find that Claude (Anthropic's GPT) is often better than GPT4 -- and very fast. Entrants can compete on price, safety, quality, etc.

Is it possible to test it somewhere?

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#138
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? If we want to build AGI, that’s a good name to choose.

Neural Networks are basically a Chinese room and it is not AGI. And there is nothing "humane" in these developments. Yes, they are inevitable, yes we would have to live with them. And maybe they will improve lives of a few millions of humans, while degrading lives of billions of others. Long term effects are particularly interesting and unpredictable.

Human brain is just an ultra large scale analog spiking neural network with some particular state realizations, not too much difference (the architecture is different, but computation seems to be universal). We even employ some internalized language models for communication purposes (together with object persistence and mental space-time models). So, while we are not yet at the level of full scale human brain emulation, we are not too far away.

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The secret is not scraping PII in the first place (which is not really difficult, though it requires some planning)

“Not that difficult”? Can you elaborate? Because I think it’s nearly insurmountable. Is the sentence “Meagan Smith graduated magma cum laude from Northwestern’s business program in 2004” PII? How about if another part of the corpus says “M. Smith had a promising career in business after graduating with honors from a prestigious school, but an unplanned pregnancy caused her to quit her job in 2006”? Does it matter if…

Where are you scraping this data from? This is the main question

> “M. Smith had a promising career in business after graduating with honors from a prestigious school, but an unplanned pregnancy caused her to quit her job in 2006”

The main issue is how that statement ended up there in the first place. Even then how many "M. Smith" have studied in prestigious schools? By itself that phrase wouldn't be PII

Now if you have a db entry with "M Smith" and entries for biographical data that's definitely PII

Re: Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

#140
post #52
post #35

If someone released a chatGPT/characterAI with NSFW content enabled it would eat into a big share of their users (and for characterAI, maybe take all of them). Seriously, look into what people are posting about when it comes to characterAI, and it's 80% "here's how to get around NSFW filters". Unsure why nobody is taking this very very obvious hole in AI tech.

It's trivial to fine tune llamma to be NSFW if that's what you want. But there's an entire universe of much more interesting apps that people don't want NSFW stuff in. That's why most foundation models filter it out.

I don't think that's the reason. You wouldn't get anything "NSFW" if you don't ask/prompt for it.
Post reply on HN