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I resigned from Anthropic today

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Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#161

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.

Your lack of creativity is not a reason to believe that a super AI is harmless or less destructive than a nuclear weapon. Damage need not be limited to destruction. Introducing doubt is sufficient. Right now you have faith that digital Financial transactions can be trusted. You have faith that computer encryption can be trusted. You have faith that digital certificates will protect you. If an AI can introduce doubt i…

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Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#162
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proof is that LLMs could barely solve arithmetic 3 years ago, but now surpass the best human mathematicians, and that this has all occurred from simple principles (RL + compute) that will continue to scale up by factors of millions in the coming years. Also, advocating for slowing LLM progress does not benefit Anthropic or OpenAI.

Haven't people learned about the peril of assuming, "Line go up" yet?! TRENDS HAVE FEEDBACK

Trends don't go on forever, but the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. There's no good rule of thumb for this, other than maybe the Lindy effect.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#163
post #120

“ No other human activity poses this level of danger.” I really, really disagree with that statement. I don’t think ai models come close to nuclear weapons or to run-of-the-mill, everyday carbon emissions in terms of danger to humanity. What’s the most dangerous thing that’s happened with an LLM so far? (This question is serious - maybe I don’t know the right examples.) Example 1: I’m aware of a small number of peopl…

Came here to also respond to that specific thing. Unless ai figures out how to make an airborne super virus from grocery store ingredients and hardware store equipment, the greatest danger is probably in a synchronized megahack of banking, logistics, and utility infrastructure.

Why grocery store ingredients and hardware store equipment? It seems feasible that the big bio labs will be running AI models to aid a lot of their research going forward, if they aren't already. Seems like the AI will have access to just about anything it wants.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#164
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm somewhat skeptical of some of the crazier ideas too. But the hugging face incident was actually very large. It was not a single agent, it was not a single target, and it was not a single event. If nothing else, that's a bit of a warning as to what can happen next time (By accident, or if a government decides to go on purpose). For now let's assume the worst that can happen is that some important/significant chunk…

Despite all of your hyping up of the Huggingface incident it ultimately caused zero actual damage.

If two airplane manufacturers were found to have massive safety issues which nearly led to enormous fatalities (but no one actually died), would you be calling for them to ground their aircraft until safety was made the number one priority?

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#165
post #14

For me, the end of the world is no more cushy software job. A fundamental shift in how I trade labor for capital might as well be the cataclysm, so bring it on.

I was about to say something similar. If my cushy ad tech disappears (as it seems to be doing), I might as well join in with bringing about the end of all professions.

Isn't that a selfish viewpoint? You're ok with that?

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they dont need to be smarter than humans. They just need to be able to hack into vital infrastructure systems faster than we can repair them while also replicating wildly

> while replicating wildly Earnest question: by what mechanism that exists today would the achieve that in a way humans on top top of the situation could not curtail? All of this runs on top of compute in meatspace that humans can disconnect.

Imagine you're the AI. Give yourself a solid minute to brainstorm ideas.

Here's my answer, as a non-superintelligent human: "see to it that the humans on top of the situation have a compelling financial interest in the systems not disconnecting".

In nuclear engineering, where safety is taken seriously, it's not enough to end the conversation at "the humans in charge can always simply shut down the reactor during a meltdown" or "a meltdown has never happened before, so we don't have to design safety systems before one does".

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#167

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?”…

I came in expecting the highest voted comment to be that this was some kind of marketing (which I disagree with). I'm glad your comment was what I saw first.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's no whistleblower program for this, they're not breaking any laws. What are you proposing he should do if not this?

At least from an interview with Amanda, key philosopher at Anthropic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9aGC6Ui3eE&t=1912s

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is indeed people. How do we make the default choices most people make, better? Consider that a lot of people will be very happy to ask an AI what to do when in the past they may have taken no advice at all. It's a hell of a burden but also a wonderful gift. If anything, progressive countries might eventually want to guarantee some basic AI access for people of all income levels.

I wouldn't be so sure. Given that the general idea is that commodity AI is terribly censored and filtered, a lot of people will probably seek out the most uncensored/abliterated models for their use, simply because they're uncomfortable with the idea of being censored or manipulated by the bigger labs. Despite that though, some people probably will benefit from the alignment done by the larger labs, though as we've s…

I've tried some abliterated models. So far, they're not evil - you can make them say evil things, but they don't leap right to it without a bit of pushing. Or perhaps I'm not asking the right questions...

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#170
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm somewhat skeptical of some of the crazier ideas too. But the hugging face incident was actually very large. It was not a single agent, it was not a single target, and it was not a single event. If nothing else, that's a bit of a warning as to what can happen next time (By accident, or if a government decides to go on purpose). For now let's assume the worst that can happen is that some important/significant chunk…

Despite all of your hyping up of the Huggingface incident it ultimately caused zero actual damage.

I have no horse in this race, but for fun on a literal rainy sunday afternoon I went in and confirmed bits of what happened myself. Besides huggingface, a bunch of wikis and url shorteners got hit too. My sympathies to the people who had to revert out all that mess.
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