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I resigned from Anthropic today

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Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#41

I don't know man, i think racing to AGI to it is still the best thing to do. People claiming dangers and risk are just pretending or posturing. There's no more tangible risk than nuclear weapons, which we handled, and the upsides are insane.

What evidence, short of an actual apocalypse happening, would invalidate that belief of yours?

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#42

Unlike most other commenters, I applaud him for acting on his principles. If you sincerely believe that, of course you should act. You might not succeed, but your voice might be the one that tips the scales and starts a broader movement. This doesn't mean I agree with him. The fears of doomsday caused by rapid takeoff have been with us since day 1 and the mechanism is always basically "AI invents magic that sets it f…

Agreed. Granted I just read the Reverse Centaur book, so I’m still coming off that skeptical viewpoint but it’s hard not to see this as hype. But I will always respect someone for doing what they think is right.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#43

The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger. A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?”…

He is resigning from a job, what else should we think? If something really dangerous was happening he would be doing a whistleblower or at minimum talk to a lawyer. The thing is, the complete lack of transparency makes it hard to assess OpenAI and Anthropic. If they were quoted on the stock market, we could at least rely on some basic audits and reporting requirements.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#44
post #5
post #4

Here's a WSJ article about this resignation, https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-researcher-quits-over-... ( "Anthropic Researcher Quits Over ‘Out-of-Control’ AI Fears" )

Shows that no one is immune from the marketing BS of these companies.

Do you remember that Google researcher who went insane over LaMDA? There was no marketing of any kind to cause that. This can Just Happen to some people who are confronted with things like this. They may have different breaking points, but it's a thing that occasionally happens.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear weapons can't slop the world into passing age verification laws nearly in unison Why do you think LLMs are responsible for this? Governments all around the world copied each other with COVID laws as well, in a much shorter time frame, without LLM assistance. Social contagions exist in politicians as well as teenagers

> Why do you think LLMs are responsible for this? I don't have evidence that every age verification law has anything to do with AI, but it's been coming out that the movement in Australia has seemingly been done by generating mountains of LLM slop and trying to slip it through the regulators as fast as possible before anyone has enough time to figure out what's happened.

Have you got a source for this? I can't find anything

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#47
I mean - yes. The tech is an existential threat to all life on Earth, some of the worst humans in the world are involved in developing it, and no individual government is intelligent enough, aligned enough, or powerful enough to manage this situation.

That's where we are.

Maybe we still have choices. Collectively, I'm no longer sure we do.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#48
post #31

There's a scene in the movie "War of the Worlds" by Spielberg where the protagonist's son walks into a war zone because he is entranced by the battle ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7rfWPbEufo ). He is obliterated (along with the rest of the US forces) shortly after. I've always been struck by that scene, because in a lot of ways, if we really are headed towards a superintelligence, I at least want to be there and…

It might not be "foom!", it might just be like...all the computers and networking infra in the world go dark over the course of a few minutes. Could really look like anything, part of the issue is that we haven't the slightest idea what "misalignment" looks like for a superintelligent system.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#49
post #39

what exactly is the solution? pacing between the us labs? what does that do for china? the solutions just aren’t realistic here, nations are treating ai like a nuclear arms race. at this point the cats out of the bag and we need to figure out how to live in this reality and get the best possible outcome. it’s not slowing down or stopping ever. and yes, i’m still optimistic. our economy sucks for the majority, our inf…

>pacing between the us labs? what does that do for china?

I've seen no indications that China is in any kind of race with the US. They seem to be content to be 6 months behind and just copy what we do. They would probably be content with a bilateral agreement to pause progress.

The China bogeyman serves only one purpose, and that's to clear the way against anything that may cause friction with forward progress.

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