Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Amodei is widely underestimated. The consensus viewpoint on the deal that OpenAI struck with the Pentagon is that Anthropic got played. I disagree. I'm certain that Amodei and his team gamed this out. In doing so, I think there's at least two conclusions they would have drawn: 1. Some other AI company would cut a deal with the Pentagon. There's no world in which all the labs boycott the Pentagon. So who? Choo…
They still need a lot of money and what their VC’s think is going to be more important than what Amedei does. Nothing more profitable than war and government. App Store rankings are meaningless, I have Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini all in top five, with a electronic mail app being 1 and a postal tracking service app (for a very small provider) being 3.
Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’
251–260 of 461 posts
Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no legal basis for blocking defense contractors from using them. Trump's claiming he can do so, but the law doesn't back him up. He'll lose in any fair court, or any corrupt court that values billionaire interests over virtue signaling to the orange one (like the Supreme Court). Also, they got a huge PR win, and jumped to #1 on the Apple App Store. Consumer market share is going to decide which of the AI comp…
There are always Executive Orders that can enforce that. It is not like in the movies where they will sort stuff out in 2 weeks in a single trial. It is going to take years, and we'll see if Anthropic survives that.
Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’
#253Maybe it’s not much and they probably won’t care but taking no action here it’s the same as being complicit.
Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a reason it's unpopular. If your company makes an herbicide that happens to be very good at killing off anyone who drinks it at a high concentration in their water supply, you're saying that there should be no way for your company to resist being used for mass murder (including unavoidable collateral damage)? Also, the core mission of the military is not "killing its adversaries through any means necessary".…
>> Unpopular opinion around here, but no company should have the ability to stop the military from its core mission: killing its adevarsaries through any means necessary. > The actual military is not evil. Your conception of it is. You're right, but there's a a real question here: should a company have the ability to control or veto the decisions of the democratically-elected government? To give different hypothetica…
Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's always hilarious watching online fights between tech industry billionaires, sort of like the geek version of UFC. The weirdest part is how regular people pick sides and defend their billionaire against the other guy.
> The weirdest part is how regular people pick sides and defend their billionaire Someone told me in another comment that it's possibly bot activity. I suspect so too, because in a tech forum like HN, a top voted comment can shift the entire focus/narrative of any given issue. I know there are a lot of mods on here to prevent this sort of thing, but given how good LLMs have gotten, I wonder if we are at a point where…
Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’
#256@pg on @sama: "you could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king." In retrospect this quote comes across as way more foreboding given what we've learned about the scale of his ambitions and his willingness to lie and bend reality to gain power. Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era. I hope he remains strong in the f…
It's always hilarious watching online fights between tech industry billionaires, sort of like the geek version of UFC. The weirdest part is how regular people pick sides and defend their billionaire against the other guy.
(Or, if the maximally cynical perspective is correct and 'principles' always actually means 'a company culture and public image that depends on the appearance of having principles, and which requires costly signals of principledness to maintain' -- well, why on earth shouldn't we favour the ones who have that property over the ones who are nakedly unprincipled, and the ones who have a paper-thin veneer that doesn't meaningfully affect their behaviour? It would be stupid to throw away the one bit of leverage we have to make powerful people behave better than they otherwise would.)
Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do I cancel my subscription to the DoW? The bigger picture is that the DoW got what it wanted and it got it by threatening one company while the other did its bidding.
By voting.
Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’
#258It's easy to frame this purely as an ethical battle, but there's a massive financial reality here. Training frontier models requires astronomical amounts of capital, and the DOD is one of the few entities with deep enough pockets to fund the next generation of compute. Anthropic turning down this Pentagon contract over safety disagreements is a huge gamble. They are essentially betting that the enterprise market will…
Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’
#259When @sama announced within hours that OAI was replacing Anthropic with the "same conditions ", it was clear that either the DoW or OAI (or both) were fudging. DoW balked at Anthropic's conditions so OAI's agreement must have made the "conditions" basically unenforceable. And sure enough, my reading of it left the impression the OAI conditions were basically "DoW won't do anything which violates the rules DoW sets fo…
I think it’s also possible DoW didn’t care about the conditions but just wanted some pretext to punish Anthropic because Dario isn’t a Trump boot licker like the rest of the SV CEOs.