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Did Anthropic ask for this?

verysane.ai

81–90 of 176 posts

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#81

Maybe this will be simpler for Anthropic to understand if they take their own high-minded philosophical nonsense and ego out of it and consider it the way a neutral party would. Suppose a company calls themselves The Doomsday Device Company. They make and sell excellent-quality doomsday devices. They regularly go online to proclaim that their doomsday devices are the best and most powerful, and also that doomsday dev…

How does this look if it's a perpetual motion machine instead of a doomsday device?

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#82
post #31

Maybe this will be simpler for Anthropic to understand if they take their own high-minded philosophical nonsense and ego out of it and consider it the way a neutral party would. Suppose a company calls themselves The Doomsday Device Company. They make and sell excellent-quality doomsday devices. They regularly go online to proclaim that their doomsday devices are the best and most powerful, and also that doomsday dev…

Another neutral party might not believe it's really a doomsday device and that what currently looks like exponential growth in capability could be an s-curve that plateaus in a year or two. After that, it will be diminishing returns to invest heavily into a tech that won't get much better. So what are the current leaders in the field supposed to do to stave off competition? They should convince the public that they d…

I was going to say. "Doomsday Device Company" is a wildly loaded description coming from an allegedly "neutral" party.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#83

Maybe this will be simpler for Anthropic to understand if they take their own high-minded philosophical nonsense and ego out of it and consider it the way a neutral party would. Suppose a company calls themselves The Doomsday Device Company. They make and sell excellent-quality doomsday devices. They regularly go online to proclaim that their doomsday devices are the best and most powerful, and also that doomsday dev…

David Sacks corroborates this: https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/2065853007619588171

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#84
post #15

What I feel like is missing in the common discourse here is that Anthropic genuinely believes that AI poses an existential risk for humanity either in terms of literal survival or extreme mass surveillance, human disempowerment etc. So if you take these risks seriously, which the median commentor on HN obviously doesn't, what is the right thing to do? I.e. OpenAI just went full evil corpo mode and went all in on the…

> So if you take these risks seriously, which the median commentor on HN obviously doesn't, what is the right thing to do? Easy. You oppose it. You dedicate all your resources to stopping not just OpenAI, but anybody trying to make these technologies. With all those billions of dollars, you could get a lot done. Anthropic doesn't do this, which exposes the fundamental hypocrisy in their stated philosophies.

Anthropic's plan may not have great odds, but your proposal is orders of magnitude worse. There are plenty of groups opposing AI. They don't get billions in investment. They don't have a clear way to stop OpenAI or Qwen. They don't get a say in what values or safety measures the top AIs get.

You'd rather they signal their virtue and give up their ability to make a difference.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#85
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with you. I think the problem is that Anthropic believes their own BS, and thinks it IS a Doomsday device which only THEY can control. I think that's what's produced this outcome.

I’m surprised people are reacting so strongly over this. Suppose there is a huge concern—would you prefer they just release it as-is and everyone suffers data-breaches and more supply-chain attacks? I used Fable 5 for a fair amount of tasks before they pulled it and I can only imagine what an untapped version of that could do. It’s very capable and equally aggressive in accomplishing its goals.

Is this not the same as security by obscurity? Open source is more secure because it's more open and thus is able to have flaws found in it more easily. So I'd probably prefer more people to have Fable level models than not.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#86

I haven’t used Claude in more than a year and didn’t even try Fable. As someone that doesn’t have a dog in this race, I feel like anthropic has been very consistent with their moral stance. First, they denied the Department of war to use their AI to conduct military operations and throughout all this, Anthropic has been the one to neuter their model and make sure that it’s not able to do a lot of things that might ca…

> First, they denied the Department of war to use their AI to conduct military operations

They did not do this, they just wanted to ensure there was a human somewhere in the loop. Despite this, the U.S. military utilized Anthropic's Claude model in classified operations, including target selection during conflicts in the Middle East.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#88
post #15

What I feel like is missing in the common discourse here is that Anthropic genuinely believes that AI poses an existential risk for humanity either in terms of literal survival or extreme mass surveillance, human disempowerment etc. So if you take these risks seriously, which the median commentor on HN obviously doesn't, what is the right thing to do? I.e. OpenAI just went full evil corpo mode and went all in on the…

> So if you take these risks seriously, which the median commentor on HN obviously doesn't, what is the right thing to do? Easy. You oppose it. You dedicate all your resources to stopping not just OpenAI, but anybody trying to make these technologies. With all those billions of dollars, you could get a lot done. Anthropic doesn't do this, which exposes the fundamental hypocrisy in their stated philosophies.

It seems like a simple solution but if Anthropic was actually to dedicate all its resources this way wouldn't the investors just demand a new CEO?

I think Anthropic believe these risks, but I also think they've spent so much time talking to Claude that they've pretty much lost their minds now. Anthropic have a model welfare department and have numerous times suggested that Claude is conscious and has human like emotions.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#89
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite a bit more complicated than that. The popular narrative is not exactly on Anthropic, as the general public is far more aware of OpenAI than Anthropic. The narrative is on AI and whether everything we know about society is going to change. Also, as far as priorities and worries go, for most people cybersecurity is way down the list.

"It's quite a bit more complicated than that." Ohhh no it isn't! (Ohh yes it is) etc "as the general public is far more aware of OpenAI than Anthropic" I run LLMs on my own gear with llama.cpp (compiled from source) and I could not tell you anything about either company except they fiddle with AI stuff and that (I don't actually care). I glaze over on news about both organisations in equal measure on mention. I think…

I'm not sure what your personal anecdote has to do with general trends, there have always been hermits in history. I also run local models with llama.cpp but I actually stay abreast of the issues in the field as we may similarly be impacted by recent actions.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#90
In all such discussions, it is interesting to track the tipping point at which public perception of Anthropic shifted.

In my mind, as recently as February, Anthropic was considered by far “the best” company on the planet, with an insane fanbase and praise left, right, and centre. The story around the DoD contract solidified them in the public eye as “the hero the city deserved.”

Then they fell into a classic monetisation trap. Unable to sustain growth at such a discount, they started nerfing models, removing caching, and doubling costs per token to make any money here.

The lack of transparency in that process cost them public perception. By early May, all the charm of the magical, ethical super-company was gone. The entire campaign around the Mythos release, intentional or not, landed on top of that new narrative and didn’t play well for them.

What is interesting to me here is the realisation that a good chunk of the hate the company received came simply because of their most recent hostile, for-profit actions. Had it happened in March, HN and the public reaction would have been vastly different. It took them just two months of “bad actions” to ruin quite a good margin of the public praise they so desperately needed now.

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