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Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

anthropic.com

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Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#241
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who unironically says that they are going to improve/police/redefine ethics should be considered immediately suspect. It's a massive red flag if someone is thinking that their ethics are better than other's. Bonus red flag points if that comes from a corporation. It is also very telling that a corporation called literally "human-first" is developing a tool to displace said humans completely. Now it is possible…

Ai will overtake all human capabilities on the right timescale. (We just don't know whether that's an order of years, decades, or centuries). It... doesn't make sense that an entire human couldn't be perfectly artificially replicated eventually (and then, obviously, surpassed immediately), unless you believe in a non-physical soul which powers some aspect of our conscious thought. Even if you believe in such a soul,…

> but a question of whether the "gods" we create will love us or hate us.

You (and pretty much the entire debate around AI safety) have smuggled in the notion that these AIs even have the capacity to "love" and "hate," and have the agency to perhaps act vindictively. How we get from predicting the most plausible next token to a god-like entity with agency is... not clear at all.

Do people think that we're actually sleepwalking towards skynet? Or are they just saying that so that Sam Altman can get the government to put in rules that bind everyone else while allowing OpenAI to proceed without competition and capture the extremely mundane real market of writing ad copy and such.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#242

FWIW I can't build OpenAI into our product without huge headaches around privacy policies and getting additional customer consent. I can build Amazon services into our products because Amazon is a trusted vendor and we use an AWS stack already. Because Anthropic / Claude is available via Amazon Bedrock, they have a significant advantage in any company that's already using AWS. If you're on Azure, OpenAI has that adva…

> FWIW I can't build OpenAI into our product without huge headaches around privacy policies and getting additional customer consent

Doesn't this imply that a new competitor beginning with a lenient customer privacy policies as well as a customer base that doesn't care as much about privacy will rise up to challenge you? And possibly iterate faster?

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#243
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do - not trying to be snarky, just legitimately interested.

each of these are known >$100m opportunities: Generative Text for writing - Jasper AI going 0 to $75m ARR in 2 years Generative Art for non-artists - Midjourney/Stable Diffusion Copilot for knowledge workers - both GitHub’s Copilot X and “Copilot for X” Conversational AI UX - ChatGPT / Bing Chat, with a long tail of Doc QA startups (shameless plug from https://www.latent.space/p/agents )

I think there are some killer products, but the surface area here is not that big. I can definitely see how we can improve on all of the above, but at the rate things are developing right now, you're looking at smaller and specialized models as the underlying infrastructure. Keeping the conversation focused on Anthropic, unless there is promise of some specific functions outside this range that require big powerful models, they're in trouble.

There is a world in which the dust settles and the current "era" of AI doesn't actually result in a significant amount of productivity/value creation and capture thereof. Everything rests on the current assumption that emergent behaviors and some semblance of consciousness can extrapolate infinitely. You have to believe that in order to justify the investments we're currently seeing in some of the big players.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#244
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generative AI is very good at spewing bullshit. Unfortunately, the upper echelons of society run on bullshit. And so that's exactly why generative AI is revolutionary. The killer app is in separating dumb billionaires from their billions, just like crypto's killer app was. And just like crypto eventually filtered down to separating dumb retail investors from their thousands, generative AI may eventually filter down t…

>A more logical solution might be to not run society on bullshit And this is why you're poor. In fact, depending on your definition of bullshit, if you did not run society on bullshit there wouldn't be billionaires at all. Once you reach the level of technology that can provide for everyone, what need is there to make more? >The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the wo…

> Once you reach the level of technology that can provide for everyone, what need is there to make more?

Because you can never reach that outcome no matter what your technology is.

Your premise is so vague as to be useless. Provide what for everyone? How much for everyone? Who decides how much for everyone? Based on what? Elected by whom?

If you actually dig into any of that what you'll find is that it's impossible. Unless you use a hyper violent authoritarian model that dictates every minute of every person's life. Otherwise, one person will always have different needs than another person, without exception (and that's so varied we could be here all day listing the differing ways, from freak health situations to genetics to activity choices).

And that's just on matters of basic needs. Then we get into luxuries, any and all things people want beyond basic needs. And then you have to debate the extent to which people require some manner of luxuries beyond basic needs in order to actually continue to exist in a healthy manner. And then you have to get into who decides on that, who dictates which people get which luxuries, if indeed it's decided people require some level of luxury in their life.

And that's just scratching the surface at a minimum for why the premise: once technology has provided for everyone - entirely implodes upon any inspection at all. It never can, it never will. Human desire is infinite up to the point of expiration. That includes the desire for new experiences (can people live without new experiences? doubtful, certainly they'll live horrific miserable lives without such), which is a gigantic envelope of things unto itself, beyond the basic needs category. Who decides what new experiences everyone has access to? How much allocation to that? And on and on and on it goes.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do - not trying to be snarky, just legitimately interested.

If you can train a machine using video, and get it to repeat what you have taught it...and then manufacture millions of them - you have an (almost)-zero-marginal-cost revolution just like you had for software development. Plus, it's replacing $$$ humans. 4X the productivity while paying for itself in a few months.

>If you can train a machine using video, and get it to repeat what you have taught it

I might be wrong, but from what I know about Transformer models and neural nets in general, what you are describing sounds a lot closer to something like an AGI.

When you say “train a machine” here it sounds a lot closer to “teach a machine” rather than “finding weights and baises for an existing function”.

I think we are still a ways off from AGI.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#246
post #242

FWIW I can't build OpenAI into our product without huge headaches around privacy policies and getting additional customer consent. I can build Amazon services into our products because Amazon is a trusted vendor and we use an AWS stack already. Because Anthropic / Claude is available via Amazon Bedrock, they have a significant advantage in any company that's already using AWS. If you're on Azure, OpenAI has that adva…

> FWIW I can't build OpenAI into our product without huge headaches around privacy policies and getting additional customer consent Doesn't this imply that a new competitor beginning with a lenient customer privacy policies as well as a customer base that doesn't care as much about privacy will rise up to challenge you? And possibly iterate faster?

Yes, but in enterprise software 'lenient customer privacy policies' don't last long.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#247
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A more logical solution might be to not run society on bullshit And this is why you're poor. In fact, depending on your definition of bullshit, if you did not run society on bullshit there wouldn't be billionaires at all. Once you reach the level of technology that can provide for everyone, what need is there to make more? >The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the wo…

> Once you reach the level of technology that can provide for everyone, what need is there to make more? Because you can never reach that outcome no matter what your technology is. Your premise is so vague as to be useless. Provide what for everyone? How much for everyone? Who decides how much for everyone? Based on what? Elected by whom? If you actually dig into any of that what you'll find is that it's impossible.…

>Human desire is infinite up to the point of expiration.

No, the only thing infinite is human greed, the difference between greed and desire is desire can make concessions for the needs of others, greed will burn down the world to get exactly what it wants.

> And then you have to get into who decides on that

As technology concentrates power, it will be the authoritarian leader. Putin is a great example of this. Greed driving him and Russia to ruin.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#248

FWIW I can't build OpenAI into our product without huge headaches around privacy policies and getting additional customer consent. I can build Amazon services into our products because Amazon is a trusted vendor and we use an AWS stack already. Because Anthropic / Claude is available via Amazon Bedrock, they have a significant advantage in any company that's already using AWS. If you're on Azure, OpenAI has that adva…

OpenAI has committed to never training on API data. You no longer need a DPA for this.

https://openai.com/enterprise-privacy

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#249
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ai will overtake all human capabilities on the right timescale. (We just don't know whether that's an order of years, decades, or centuries). It... doesn't make sense that an entire human couldn't be perfectly artificially replicated eventually (and then, obviously, surpassed immediately), unless you believe in a non-physical soul which powers some aspect of our conscious thought. Even if you believe in such a soul,…

> but a question of whether the "gods" we create will love us or hate us. You (and pretty much the entire debate around AI safety) have smuggled in the notion that these AIs even have the capacity to "love" and "hate," and have the agency to perhaps act vindictively. How we get from predicting the most plausible next token to a god-like entity with agency is... not clear at all. Do people think that we're actually sl…

> You (and pretty much the entire debate around AI safety) have smuggled in the notion that these AIs even have the capacity to "love" and "hate," and have the agency to perhaps act vindictively.

It's a metaphor, actually. I guess I needed heavier use of quotes.

The one thing we can be sure of is that if goal-oriented AI exists, it will follows goals.

> How we get from predicting the most plausible next token to a god-like entity with agency is... not clear at all.

It doesn't have to be clear. If it was clear, we'd be working on it. That's... how invention works.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#250
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generative AI is very good at spewing bullshit. Unfortunately, the upper echelons of society run on bullshit. And so that's exactly why generative AI is revolutionary. The killer app is in separating dumb billionaires from their billions, just like crypto's killer app was. And just like crypto eventually filtered down to separating dumb retail investors from their thousands, generative AI may eventually filter down t…

>A more logical solution might be to not run society on bullshit And this is why you're poor. In fact, depending on your definition of bullshit, if you did not run society on bullshit there wouldn't be billionaires at all. Once you reach the level of technology that can provide for everyone, what need is there to make more? >The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the wo…

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