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I resigned from Anthropic today

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Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#451

Post by cure_42 »

jenadine wrote: post #409
cure_42 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so wildly incorrect I don't even know where to start. For one, they were absolutely programmed to play chess if they can play chess. That is the only way they can play chess. For another, they cannot understand literally anything, much less love. Trying to actually educate you would be an exercise in futility, enjoy your willful ignorance, I hear it's bliss. But for anyone reading this, this is absolutely, un…

This is so wildly incorrect I don't even know where to start. For one, as you said yourself, they were just programmed to compute the probability of the next token. They were not programmed to play chess, chess games just happened to be in the training data. For another, there is no formal definition of "understand", and it is therefore impossible to tell whether or not they "understand". (But my claim was that one n…

No. They can't play chess on a grandmaster level without a harness programmed to make it possible. Simply training an LLM on chess games isn't enough.

It's moronic to suggest a "formal" definition of a commonly understood word is somehow necessary to say whether that word applies in a given situation.

LLMs cannot write poetry via understanding what makes good poetry. They generate tokens. They do not know whether those tokens are poetry or a recipe for cat food. Because they cannot know anything.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#452

Post by vrganj »

bpodgursky wrote: post #421
thomascountz wrote: post #417

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

#453

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

#454

Post by bob1029 »

CodeCompost wrote: post #312

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

#455

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

#456

Post by thomascountz »

icepush wrote: post #423
thomascountz wrote: post #417

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

#457

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

#458

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

#459

Post by asdff »

Scrapemist wrote: post #412
asdff wrote: post #397

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.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#460

Post by rrgok »

TheBozzCL wrote: post #439
bpodgursky wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Calling things you disagree with "slop" is slop /s But just in case you haven't noticed, we live in a world where a ridiculously wealthy minority can derail whole countries by ther whims. Wealth concentrating on a single select few is an absolute disaster for the rest of us, because we lose power to them.

> Calling things you disagree with "slop" is slop /s

Does this apply recursively? /s

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