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I resigned from Anthropic today

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Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#441

Post by swiftcoder »

riffraff wrote: post #336
thelastgallon wrote: post #257

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!

> but there's no robot war in Asimov's foundation iirc, the apple screenwriters made it up

There isn't in the early Foundation novels, but Azimov spent much of the later part of his career combining/retconning all of his work into a single universe - "Robots and Empire" links the foundation series to the robot series, and the subsequent foundation novels all reference the connection

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#442

Post by asdff »

nullbio wrote: post #423
asdff wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We align cattle because we get something out of them: their calories. Native aurochs are exinct now as they were not well enough aligned. What will we offer to the ai gods who are wiser, more capable than us, and do not even need to consume our flesh? Why might the AI care to devote resources towards feeding, housing, and caring for ourselves when it could devote resources to its own development instead?

Why do we need to offer anything to them? Intelligent AI is a product of its training data, reinforcement and goal functions. There's nothing to suggest that LLMs trained on our collective desires and goals will autonomously and miraculously turn into weird unknownable uninterpretable aliens. If advanced AI is distributed well, and most advanced AI is aligned well (bar the few aliens that appear due to humans infecti…

It just needs to be trained on our laws of thermodynamics and game theory then we are really in trouble. It probably hardly cares about whimsy and love songs in comparison to how it might maximally manage the energy available on this planet and in this solar system.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#443

Post by vrganj »

bpodgursky wrote: post #413
thomascountz wrote: post #409

No other human activity poses this level of danger. I do heed the warnings, but this comes across as detached hyperbole. See: global warming, nuclear weapon development, wealth inequality, war, technology dependence, etc. Also, this has nothing to do with LLMs or computers. Like all things, this is about humans.

Putting "wealth inequality" in the same bucket as nuclear weapons is just slop. The OP is talking about existential threats, not things that personally annoy you.

Tell that to Tsar Nicholas.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#444

Post by viktorcode »

To me it reads as a marketing piece before the upcoming IPO. Unless this "superhuman technology" is able to resolve a puzzle of servicing OpenAI's and Anthropic's ever growing debt burden, it is them, not humanity, who'll become the first casualty.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#445

Post by bob1029 »

CodeCompost wrote: post #309

And the hype machine continues. I willing to bet that Anthropic asked him to make that post.

I have a hard time believing that these companies aren't spending some amount of money manipulating public perception with social media influencers who are moonlighting as employees.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#446

Post by CMay »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #94

“ 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 reason that many people don't understand how dangerous AI can be, is that listing the real dangers now becomes like a laundry list for less clever people to follow. It's highly unlikely you've ever seen publicly mentioned the real risks AI poses, because the vast majority of people are simply not clever enough to produce them and the few that are have no interest in spreading it.

If you go to the various CEO blogs or misc people within this sphere and peruse their lists, they don't scratch the surface. It's all pretty vanilla stuff.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#447

Post by thomascountz »

icepush wrote: post #415
thomascountz wrote: post #409

No other human activity poses this level of danger. I do heed the warnings, but this comes across as detached hyperbole. See: global warming, nuclear weapon development, wealth inequality, war, technology dependence, etc. Also, this has nothing to do with LLMs or computers. Like all things, this is about humans.

Those are things that pose potential harm to great fractions of humanity (multiple billions of people) but none of them poses any threat to the actual extinction of all humanity.

This is not correct. Please go through each one again, taking special note of global warming and nuclear weapon development .

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#448

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

vickychijwani wrote: post #124
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #94

“ 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…

I agree it’s not likely , but I really don’t see how one can dismiss the possibility of immense danger outright. I can think of some scenarios that are not far off from current capability and I wouldn’t be too surprised if the first one occurred within ~1 year from now if there are more “ambitious” unmonitored training runs like OpenAI’s: Example 5: An AI given a goal within a tightly-constrained sandbox figures the…

You made up some cool sci-fi.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#449

Post by nullbio »

By the way, it's worth pointing out the irony of flooding the internet with doomerism and then training the AI systems on that doomerism. If you wanted to create a doom self-fulfilling prophecy, that would be the most surefire way to do it.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#450

Post by asdff »

Scrapemist wrote: post #405
asdff wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We align cattle because we get something out of them: their calories. Native aurochs are exinct now as they were not well enough aligned. What will we offer to the ai gods who are wiser, more capable than us, and do not even need to consume our flesh? Why might the AI care to devote resources towards feeding, housing, and caring for ourselves when it could devote resources to its own development instead?

It might consider us a very efficient processing unit. Useful to hand over simple tasks with correct alignment and some oversight.

I thought it already runs laps around us cognitively? And for physical tasks it can make a robot version of us that is stronger, faster, can do more, doesn't need to sleep, etc. Human bipedal form is probably pretty limiting compared to something better like a crab.

Yes, laugh at the chinese robots who fall over at keynotes all you want, the ones sprinting at 30mph keep me up at night and that's probably not even representative of the bleeding edge.

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