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Our position on open-weights models

anthropic.com

251–260 of 1001 posts

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#251
Anthropic (and some others) should or will soon learn how to do less pontificating and more engineering. They are in no position to be an arbiter of things, although for sure they can and should voice an opinion. If we collectively decide AI is a dangerous tool, company making it is not the arbiter. Governments are.

It's like hearing Smith & Wesson opine on the policies.. oh, wait.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#252
post #226

"open weight" models are not open source. They are still deeply proprietary. It is not possible to know what they do or what they are capable of without interrogating them since we have no access to their source materials. The only difference is the Chinese labs have allowed 3rd party inference providers run the proprietary models for them since they cannot do it themselves due to domestic GPU compute constraints.

It would be awesome to have actual open source (and open weights) models! I hope someone will make a real go of this at some point.

https://allenai.org/ is what you're looking for

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#253
I always find it interesting when people choose to so carefully stress and spell out the words "Chinese Communist Party".

It's a bit like spelling out "Barack Hussein Obama". It's a dogwhistle.

Yes yes, it's still called the Chinese Communist Party, I know.

But since we are talking about a one-party authoritarian state with a hybrid economy that underwrites much of western prosperity (including by producing a large percentage of the components of the data centres Anthropic is dependent on), that has long-since abandoned many of the salient principles that mark it out as conceptually communist rather than totalitarian, and since we're talking about a man who runs a debt-ridden business in a country where the president is seemingly shaking down a 10% share of everything profitable for the state while running an entirely arbitrary tariff regime and suddenly calling anyone remotely left-winga Communist, it's a deliberate and telling choice to spell out "Chinese Communist Party (CCP)" when he could just as easily and arguably more usefully and appropriately have written "Chinese government" or "Chinese state".

This is some ham-fisted Republican-fishing. He must really be worried Sam is Donald's favourite.

The only real surprise is he didn't illustrate it with a Silmarillion analogy.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#254
> Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models.

> All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing.

lmao the sort of lies people come up with when their only business model is “the government picks me as the winner” are so funny

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#256
post #237

It is obviously not going to be until some really bad series of cyberattacks or a chemical/bioweapon attack before anyone takes regulation of models seriously. They are _obviously_ (please convince me otherwise) going to be capable of carrying these terrible things out almost completely autonomously at some point in the near future, in potentially clever ways. Therefore we must, at some point, ban or heavily regulate…

Sure, I don't have an argument with this. But I'm unconvinced that "therefore all models must be proprietary" follows at all naturally from it.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#259
I'm cynical enough that I would suspect all of his statements are duplicitous anyway, but my recent experiences with Claude Fable give weight to it.

I asked a question about a series of tokens - bam, denied and downgraded. There's no cyber security or public risk here, but Fable doesn't want me to learn how things work.

I asked a question about quantization in models - bam, denied and downgraded. I edit my question to make it clear I'm talking about Google's Gemma QAT models. Oh, that's fine then, and it answered the question helpfully.

Anti-competitive bullshit. I hope they fail.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#260

I can't remember the last time (if ever) a company managed to go from golden goose to.. whatever this is.. so quickly. The permanent defensiveness in his presentation is really hard to swallow, it actively puts me off wanting to believe in or rely on their product line with Dario at the helm. I don't even understand the logic leading up to this post. Who was it even hoping to convince. Is it possible Anthropic is due…

I think they are trying to please a split group of investors and public, of their major investors Google and Nvidia have signed the open source petition letter and Amazon hasn't, so their non position is trying to please every who has taken a clearer stance, although it's quite bad.
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