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Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

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351–360 of 716 posts

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#352
I was wondering if it was because of heavy-handedness of the administration, but apparently:

> The policy change is separate and unrelated to Anthropic’s discussions with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Their core argument is that if we have guardrails that others don't, they would be left behind in controlling the technology, and they are the "responsible ones." I honestly can't comprehend the timeline we are living in. Every frontier tech company is convinced that the tech they are working towards is as humanity-useful as a cure for cancer, and yet as dangerous as nuclear weapons.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#354
post #351

Worth checking this post from someone who actually has worked on this change: > I take significant responsibility for this change. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HzKuzrKfaDJvQqmjh/responsibl...

> I generally think it’s bad to create an environment that encourages people to be afraid of making mistakes, afraid of admitting mistakes and reticent to change things that aren’t working

"move fast and break things" ?

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#355

Public benefit corporations in the AI space have become a farce at this point. They're just regular corporations wearing a different hat, driven by the same money dynamics as any other corp. They have no ability to balance their stated "mission" with their drive for profit. When being "evil" is profitable and not-evil is not, guess which road they'll take...

Well, now I'm wondering, if the company was chartered with the public benefit in mind, could you not sue if they don't follow through with working in the public interest?

If regular corporations are sued for not acting in the interests of shareholders, that would suggest that one could file a suit for this sort of corporate behavior.

I'm not even a lawyer (I don't even play one on TV) and public benefit corporations seem to be fairly new, so maybe this doesn't have any precedent in case law, but if you couldn't sue them for that sort of thing, then there's effectively no difference between public benefit corporations and regular corporations.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's "entertaining" is more the speed at which it's happening. It took Google probably 15 years to fully evil-ize. Anthropic ... two? There is no "ethical capitalism" big tech company possible, esp once VC is involved, and especially with the current geopolitical circumstances.

Apparently they got coerced by the current US admin. The department of war in particular, who want to use their products for military applications. Not much room for "safety" there. Then again, the entire US is currently speedrunning an evil build.

There is no department of war.

It's just a silly woke secretary choosing their own imaginary pronouns.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#358

I was wondering if it was because of heavy-handedness of the administration, but apparently: > The policy change is separate and unrelated to Anthropic’s discussions with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with the matter. Their core argument is that if we have guardrails that others don't, they would be left behind in controlling the technology, and they are the "responsible ones." I honestly can't compreh…

Would nuclear energy research be a good analogy then? Seems like a path we should have kept running down, but stopped bc of the weapons. So we got the weapons but not the humanity saving parts (infinite clean energy)

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#359

Public benefit corporations in the AI space have become a farce at this point. They're just regular corporations wearing a different hat, driven by the same money dynamics as any other corp. They have no ability to balance their stated "mission" with their drive for profit. When being "evil" is profitable and not-evil is not, guess which road they'll take...

In general public benefit corporations and non-profits should have a very modest salary cap for everybody involved and specific public-benefit legally binding mission statements. Anybody involved should also be prohibited from starting a private company using their IP and catering to the same domain for 5-10 years after they leave. Non-profits where the CEO makes millions or billions are a joke. And if e.g. your miss…

It’s not the CEO’s fault - they had to take all that money to keep their org a non-profit.

B corps are like recycling programs, a nice logo.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#360
post #351

Worth checking this post from someone who actually has worked on this change: > I take significant responsibility for this change. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HzKuzrKfaDJvQqmjh/responsibl...

This guy from Effective Altruism pivoted away from helping the poor to help try to control AI from being a terminator type entity and then pivoted to being, ah, its okay for it to be a terminator type entity.

> Holden Karnofsky, who co-founded the EA charity evaluator GiveWell, says that while he used to work on trying to help the poor, he switched to working on artificial intelligence because of the “stakes”:

> “The reason I currently spend so much time planning around speculative future technologies (instead of working on evidence-backed, cost-effective ways of helping low-income people today—which I did for much of my career, and still think is one of the best things to work on) is because I think the stakes are just that high.”

> Karnofsky says that artificial intelligence could produce a future “like in the Terminator movies” and that “AI could defeat all of humanity combined.” Thus stopping artificial intelligence from doing this is a very high priority indeed.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/09/defective-altrui...

He is just giving everyone permission to do bad things by saying a lot of words around it.

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