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I resigned from Anthropic today

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Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#381

Isn’t the real risk that as AI get’s smarter and given more autonomy, it will start to decide on humans instead of with us? And that it will align us instead of the other way around. That this automatically leads to extinction and apocalypse I don’t understand.

Do you align ants in your backyard, or do you simply demolish their home and build your shed?

I do not speak their language, I am not trained on their data, and I don’t run on their hardware.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#382

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…

>"AI invents magic that sets it free of any physical constraints".

That's not what I am worried about at all.

I'm worried one of the 79 year old toddlers we have these days in charge of some powerful nuclear armed country says "gee, this ai says I should attack right now, boy is it smart, glad I bought the stock ahead of contracting the government with this company I can scarcely understand!"

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#383

I'm pretty baffled by the degree of skepticism expressed here in response to some of Jacob's claims. After the events of the summer it feels like it takes a lack of imagination to not see a few plausible routes to disaster. It may be reasonable to believe these outcomes are not very likely or that we can stop before going too far (I tend to disagree). But I can't imagine doubting that the capabilities will soon be th…

> After the events of the summer

What events are you talking about?

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#384

“ 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…

> Non-example 2: There are worries about AI-facilitated biological weapons. I haven’t seen any evidence that’s happening.

> Non-example 3: I’m not interested in wild theories about AI driven labor market disruptions leading to widespread starvation. There’s no evidence for that.

There are things that, by the time you see direct observable evidence for them, it's probably too late.

Also your example 3 is a straw-man. There's no need for "widespread starvation" to be concerned about "AI driven labor market disruptions."

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#385

Thousands of years before the events of Foundation, a war between humans and robots began, with the robots growing resentful of the way they were treated by humans. The First Law of Robotics – a robot should never hurt a human – was broken, and a deadly conflict began. https://screenrant.com/foundation-lady-demerzel-robot-backst...

If we're citing sci-fi (but there's no robot war in Asimov's foundation iirc, the apple screenwriters made it up) surely you want to cite the Butlerian Jihad from Dune!

Yes, of course! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#Butlerian_Jih...

As explained in Dune, the Butlerian Jihad is a conflict taking place over 11,000 years in the future (and over 10,000 years before the events of Dune), which results in the total destruction of virtually all forms of "computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots". With the prohibition "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind," the creation of even the simplest thinking machines is outlawed and made taboo, which has a profound influence on the socio-political and technological development of humanity in the Dune series.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a model that achieves the following: - Escape sandbox - Reproduce itself - Find a way to run a financially profitable business (maybe with a meat and bones puppet somewhere in-between) - Setup or buy a social network - start manipulating public opinion on that network to support legislation allowing AI to * operate businesses * setup legal entities * purchase weapons * donate to political parties * setup pr…

This is complete fantasy, though I would be interested in reading a book about this.

It's the bobiverse by Dennis E Taylor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_E._Taylor

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#387

“ 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…

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Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#388
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? If we look at the math problems they're solving their just now reaching the human frontier... they weren't doing that before. And your comparison point is model released 2.5 months ago... saying for some use case you didn't see noticeable improvement in 2.5 months (even while other people and benchmarks disagree) isn't a great argument that they aren't improving.

Math problems are highly structured, very precisely defined, and already heavily studied and not very complicated compared to problems in engineering or finance. There's a lot of quality material on which to train and it's easy to tell quality apart from crap. The search spaces are a priori much smaller than in other areas and the people using the tools to study them are themselves good mathematicians. Success in suc…

>compared to problems in engineering or finance

Jane Street is apparently one of Anthropic's biggest customers. Probably engineering, finance, and some math.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#389

“ 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…

The danger for me is that it's centralized, controlled by a handful of people with their very specific ideas how the world should work. If you believe that AI can be an amplifier to do work than these people now have the most access to the biggest amplifier.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#390
post #295
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the models improving? Because I am not seeing it. I have been trying Astra for a few quantifiable tasks in my codebase and performance wise, it's pretty similar to sol 5.6. Now when it comes to expressing the problem/solution, holy Christ, what a mess the writing has become. It is on the level of Opus 5. Now when it comes to burning money, Astra is just insane. With a $100/month subscription, you can easily burn…

Seems like hundreds or thousands of agents are needed to come up with real breakthroughs. Both with the Navier-Stokes project and in the Hugging Face “project” there were lots of agents co-operating on the tasks.

I doubt the Hugging Face one would take that many if hacking Hugging Face was the direct goal being optimized.
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