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On AI regulation and messaging

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Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#211
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, it's not three years since. The real improvements in programming ability arrived in the last 6-8 months. Second, the Internet didn't show up much in GDP and similar measures either! But your point stands. Where are the amazing digital products/stuff? I get that it might take time to arrive as we scale up compute and learn new paradigms. But so much infra already exists (deployment pipeliens, everyone reachable…

> Where are the amazing digital products/stuff? I've done amounts of refactoring and fixes and written tooling that just wouldn't have happened before. I'm not sure what amazing new stuff y'all expect but the amount of technical debt in my projects is actually going down, cause I can finally get good enough test coverage, including E2E/load tests that actually prove whether the software works and scales or doesn't -…

For that you need a management that actually lets you use the token budget for stuff like refactoring, fixes, and test coverage. Unfortunately I'd wager that's an exception and the rule is (still) that to most managers LLMs are "feature machine go BRRRRT", leaving even less time for anything else besides pushing out features at a breakneck speed because you're supposed to be 10x more efficient now.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#212
I really liked their brand position a year ago. But having Boris talk about "Claude's brain" on stage & their other founder pretending AI is sentient in front of the pope - they're coming off more as a religion than a tech company (and this is aside from the obvious model issues they're having).

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#213
> We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.

1. He is giving his word that if he cures cancer, he will brag about it as loudly as possible. Admirable dude! I actually trust him on this 100%

2. “We hope to have incredible results” -> doesn’t everybody hope to have incredible results?

3. “Some early glimmers in the coming months” -> is that planned for a few days before the IPO?

This guy says less than politicians do.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#214
Just want to say, this comment section on this website would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It’s wild: all the engineers have developed class consciousness. I wonder how that happened?

Anyway, it’s fun to watch, but remember to stay sane guys, be aware of the pendulum dynamics.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#215

> We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that. 1. He is giving his word that if he cures cancer, he will brag…

> This guy says less than politicians do.

This is a good thing cause all politicians lie all the time :)

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#216
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid. First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet. They all obtain donations on the basis of "together, we will cure cancer" messaging. They all fund the best science they can. Second, the human body is a complicated thing. You can feed your fancy LLM as many textbooks a…

> First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I think charities exist to exist. They don't have a strong incentive to actually deliver on their mission. Everyone at the org may be fully bought it and obviously want to cure cancer, but as an organization it would fail to deliver on the promise. Like most organisms, their actual purpose is to continue t…

> Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I think charities exist to exist. They don't have a strong incentive to actually deliver on their mission. Everyone at the org may be fully bought it and obviously want to cure cancer, but as an organization it would fail to deliver on the promise. Like most organisms, their actual purpose is to continue to be influential, grow and continue to exist.

I mean, yes, "I haven't looked into the specifics, but working from the first principles I came up with in 3 seconds, cancer research charities are in fact cancer on society" does come off a bit reductively cynical.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides cancer isn't really "a disease" but rather "a family of diseases" that can vary a lot. Even breast cancer can be one of many different cancers. It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"

We will cure virus.

> We will cure virus.

It is possible to prevent most viruses by recoding the human genome (requires embryo engineering or pre-embryo engineering) to use alternate codons that existing natty viruses don't use. This wouldn't prevent synthetic viruses from being developed that use the alternate codons, of course. See (1) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2016-05-10/ultr... and (2) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2017-05-09/ultr... and (3) https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/1720875112541364535 for some background.

As for "curing cancer", I suspect that Anthropic or OpenAI will use their high status/reputation to launder the existing solutions (germline, p53, enhanced DNA damage repair pathways, higher tumor-suppressor-to-oncogene copy number, more robust tumor-suppressor networks, more self-anti-cancer apoptosis, CD47 suppression, etc) that society has refused to accept. They might have enough reputation to get people to look at these ideas. It won't cure people with stage 5 turbo-cancer a.k.a the walking dead, but hopefully we won't be moving the goal posts _that_ much on them.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will cure virus.

> We will cure virus. It is possible to prevent most viruses by recoding the human genome (requires embryo engineering or pre-embryo engineering) to use alternate codons that existing natty viruses don't use. This wouldn't prevent synthetic viruses from being developed that use the alternate codons, of course. See (1) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2016-05-10/ultr... and (2) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/trans…

What could possibly go wrong...

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#219
> Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine

I hope they have better sandboxes in their biology lab than they did in their cyber security lab.

More seriously, these sociopaths will soon release lab-made viruses into the world to prove AI's capability and to force governments into regulation of open models. It should be obvious by now that with their savior complex, the goals (cure cancer, AI safety, save humanity) justify any means.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#220

Just want to say, this comment section on this website would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It’s wild: all the engineers have developed class consciousness. I wonder how that happened? Anyway, it’s fun to watch, but remember to stay sane guys, be aware of the pendulum dynamics.

> I wonder how that happened

Layoff.

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