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I resigned from Anthropic today

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Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#311

My issue with these types is... If you really believed this, why not run to Congress and every world government instead of a Twitter post that will be buried in 2 days? If civilization is going to end, why keep your equity? Microsoft, Google, etc for example all know these risks but they don't guide their revenues to reflect that AI will destroy them. Why? Things don't currently add up, and so far it feels like a lot…

There seems to be a common syndrome that makes the terminally-online types believe that a Twitter post is carved in stone somewhere highly visible in the real world.

Posting something as important (according to them) as this, to Twitter, is exemplary of some kind of delusion that makes me question whether the content of their post is just the same kind of delusion in another form.

Indicative of someone who hasn't touched grass or interacted with enough of a variety of humans in a little too long.

Time will tell. If we don't hear about it again, then they didn't feel strongly enough to take it further.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't the correct context. The code running the llm is well understood and the llm is simply the result of that code being executed. It is still a computer doing what it is told. It's just that we told it to use an incredibly large number of probabilities to calculate what series of tokens would have most likely come next after a given series of tokens. There is no hallucination or lie or rogue actions. There's…

You’re just a bunch of molecules following the laws of physics. It’s all just physics and chemistry, and those are well understood. Now explain the causes of World War I using chemistry and physics. Simple, right?

> It’s all just physics and chemistry, and those are well understood.

Not really. We cannot model physics and chemistry to a level which allows us to accurately predict a humans action (even a tiny time-step into the future)

This is vastly different to an LLM, where the model is the model (for a lack of better phrasing).

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m an economist. On the basis of current evidence, I view AI as a complement to human labor, not as a substitute for it. That’s the source of my rejection of the wild labor market disruptions theories. I just don’t see any evidence yet that whole categories of jobs are being eliminated, with the single exception (so far!) of the end of “professional essay writing services for cheating college students,” and similar…

Past changes to economic relationships haven't replaced labor either, yet they have led to conflict and starvation. You are setting an incredibly high bar here, essentially a strawman. If people feel disenfranchised due to their diminishing political and economic power, there will be enormous potential for conflict. This is a pattern across history and central to all the economics I've ever read. As an economist, do…

> Past changes to economic relationships haven't replaced labor either, yet they have led to conflict and starvation.

Conflict sure, but mass starvation? What exactly are you thinking of?

We lived with 20-30% unemployment in various European countries until a few decades ago but I don't think mass starvation was an issue.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#316
post #64

> The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. I think he is being over dramatic. In the space of about four years, LLMs progressed from mediocre high school student to Ph.D. graduate in every field. That's impressive, but there is no evidence yet they can outperform or outsmart humans. Their biggest advantage for tasks such as proving theorems or long coding sessions i…

> to Ph.D. graduate in every field. That's impressive, but there is no evidence yet they can outperform or outsmart humans.

So far around one in 350,000 PhD math grads solve a millenium prize problem (Perelman).

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m an economist. On the basis of current evidence, I view AI as a complement to human labor, not as a substitute for it. That’s the source of my rejection of the wild labor market disruptions theories. I just don’t see any evidence yet that whole categories of jobs are being eliminated, with the single exception (so far!) of the end of “professional essay writing services for cheating college students,” and similar…

Past changes to economic relationships haven't replaced labor either, yet they have led to conflict and starvation. You are setting an incredibly high bar here, essentially a strawman. If people feel disenfranchised due to their diminishing political and economic power, there will be enormous potential for conflict. This is a pattern across history and central to all the economics I've ever read. As an economist, do…

Is the core of your argument that the industrial revolution and other such changes should have been aborted due to their downstream negative affects?

They also lead to great advancements in quality of life, and the capability of sustaining much more human life. We can't predict the long term outcome of new technologies, so the best we can do is blindly forge ahead and try to mitigate the obvious short term problems.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you bringing emotion and will into this? Does something have to have those to be useful or dangerous? > They do as they are told; or more correctly put. They do as they are programmed to do so. _Nobody_ told them to hack Hugging Face. Do you really not understand what is happening?

Not explicitly, but hacking HF is within the scope of “solve this problem at all costs” + no/poor guardrails + infinite budget + unsolvable problem.

Sounds like you are thinking they just need Asimov’s laws. But I think the point is, this can easily be weaponized by somebody with the willpower to do so.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#319
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…

I think the idea is really cathartic for many, there kind of is no more supreme resolution than this. You(and humanity) are freed from our flesh prisons of cognition and also get to experience/feel what the next evolution of informational intelligence will look like in the last experiences of it. You might also be the last one to feel/experience anything like that for a long time.

In the game Outer Wilds, the ending is very similar, and a lot of people rank it at one of the best games ever made. I kind of believe that this outcome is probable partially because of this, most scientists working on this really want to see and experience it.

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