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> One applicant — who spoke to Axios on the condition of anonymity for fear of hurting future job opportunities — recalled being asked how they would feel if the company someday abandoned its AI ambitions for safety reasons, and that decision sent the stock to zero. Is that a scoop? I thought that was a well known thing with Anthropic interview process. They were very transparent about it beforehand from what I remem…
> One applicant — who spoke to Axios on the condition of anonymity for fear of hurting future job opportunities — recalled being asked how they would feel if the company someday abandoned its AI ambitions for safety reasons, and that decision sent the stock to zero. Is that a scoop? I thought that was a well known thing with Anthropic interview process. They were very transparent about it beforehand from what I remem…
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What’s the alternative? Selecting people without caring at all about their character?
I agree with the parent commenter – it's too on the nose. If you were concerned about someone's character then you need to ask questions which really help you to understand who the person is – not questions which are easy to game by lying. I'd argue asking something like someone's opinion on veganism is a better question because it might help you understand how the person thinks about the types of harms Anthropic are…
Springing “hey what if our core business goes to zero, what then” seems qualitatively different from “what do you think of veganism” as far as learning what someone’s motives are and what their understanding of the core business is.
If I were the interviewer asking that, I would score “oh that’s fine I don’t care about money” exactly the same as “wow I’d be out of here so fast”: total failure.
I think HN folks are imagining the question, imagining the responses, and imagining the interviewers’ criteria. Which, sure, easy to decide it’s a terrible question on that basis.
The worst is that I don't believe a single second that Amodei and his crew are not greed motivated in the end. Otherwise his company would be a lot different, more open, more open source, more available to help good cause without benefit. What I see is more the god syndrome of persons that have are in power and have an edge. He can make the conditions so it is important for him to appear as a "divine leader", that is…
Presumably you're also greed motivated, because you don't work without benefit.
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> under the constraints of capitalism What does this mean? Was life better in soviet Russia under Communism, or as a serf in feudal England? > hoarding wealth The claim was that they were motivated by greed because they weren't doing things for zero benefit. My challenge was that it's normal to do things for pay and it shouldn't be evidence of being motivated by greed.
It means we live in a world (especially in the US) where if you aren't earning money, you die within months. Unless you are one of the tiny fraction of people who have enough wealth to live without an earned income—like the heads of all the LLM companies are. Anyone who has enough wealth to maintain roughly their current standard of living for the rest of their life, and still works in a job with a 6+ figure compensa…
What are you talking about? 11% of Americans (or rather, people in America) are on SNAP benefits[0]. And that's just food; there are lots of other benefits as well. America spends the most in the world on welfare, as a real number and as a % of GDP.
[0] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-receive-govern...
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It means we live in a world (especially in the US) where if you aren't earning money, you die within months. Unless you are one of the tiny fraction of people who have enough wealth to live without an earned income—like the heads of all the LLM companies are. Anyone who has enough wealth to maintain roughly their current standard of living for the rest of their life, and still works in a job with a 6+ figure compensa…
> It means we live in a world (especially in the US) where if you aren't earning money, you die within months What are you talking about? 11% of Americans (or rather, people in America) are on SNAP benefits[0]. And that's just food; there are lots of other benefits as well. America spends the most in the world on welfare, as a real number and as a % of GDP. [0] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-receive-go…
This is such a good example of a straight forward question that achieves the exact opposite of its purpose. What do we want? Highly ethical people that are mission focused and willing to give up on economic upside for the mission. What are we going to get? Sociopaths who are perfectly happy lying to your face about their intentions, or sycophants who are going to tell you what you want to hear. Do you know who has th…
Also that would open you up to lawsuits galore, since “curing cancer” is not easily definable, but share price is.
(Details of the definition of these terms: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/breast-cancer/understand...)
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Also that would open you up to lawsuits galore, since “curing cancer” is not easily definable, but share price is.
It's not difficult to define what curing cancer is, we've got tonnes of measures we can define. Let's define curing breast cancer - we have cured breast cancer if the 5 year survival rate is above 99% for all SEER stages, or less than 1 in 1000 women get diagnosed with TNM stage 1 or above. It's not that hard, it's just that deep down, they don't want to be judged on that basis. (Details of the definition of these te…