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I resigned from Anthropic today

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Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#861

Post by rirze »

jonplackett wrote: post #680
dostick wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like Nathan Macintosh joke about AI https://youtu.be/ce-aWzOUs2A?si=9CkJ9x2rRMBdzCyO

The thing he talks about in there - an ad telling a dad to use AI for his daughter’s wedding speech. I agree is just so sad. And I’ve seen LOADS of other ads like that encouraging people to use AI for things like asking someone to move seats on a train, or for a neighbour that plays music loudly. They literally want to drain people of their social skills, and humanity. It’s weird

Trust me, only people who were unable to do it in the first place will substitute basic human skills with AI output. They never developed it in the first place.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#862

Post by LogicFailsMe »

ethbr1 wrote: post #844
snaking0776 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally I don’t think anyone is arguing about the for now part. I don’t think it’s crazy to extrapolate out a few years and ask what kind of danger we’ll be in then. A team of 10,000 agents just solved the Navier Stokes problem (sans bad behavior by the researchers). Even 1 year ago that would have been unimaginable. What happens to this risk view as: 1. Robotics begin rolling out more broadly across the world. 2.…

> 1. Robotics begin rolling out more broadly across the world. To borrow the Strangelove quip, this is not only necessary but essential . Broader physical robotic deployments are the glue that connects {cheap synthetic intelligence} to {physical outcomes}. The former is a newer phenomenon, in the LLMs-can-approximate-higher-intelligence-well sense, so robotics deployments haven't caught up yet (outside of the highest…

They'd also have to be self-assembling from the ground up or rely on human slaves. They'd need to understand the world much better. And they'd have to be incredibly more power efficient. These all remain hard problems right now. That said, you could swarm people with cheap drones (the predicted slaughterbots) that were assembled by robots that eventually break down I guess, but how is that any worse than a crazy human with a gun or what nation states do to people they deem enemies already? The worst these things seem capable of is an attack on the infrastructure and shutting down the Internet. Perhaps this is a great time to insure that our infrastructure is capable of operating autonomously indefinitely and hardening it against attack? But unfortunately, no VC or politician will touch that until something bad happens.

So broadly, a better educated Blake Lemoine IMO. What's disturbing to me is how fast and far some junior minion from the frontier labs was platformed all the way to the Wall Street Journal over a tweet that sounds exactly like every other anti-AI tweet. I share concerns about irresponsible deployments of AI, and we need technological literacy in the leadership, but America hates technocracy and prefers populism so buckle up.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#863

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

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 think the threat to the internet is quite real and not theoretical. Air gapping may become a lot more critical very quickly.

We may not be far away from a state where anything connected to the internet (ip-addressable) is considered a vulnerability. Ironically, maybe we would finally have an excuse to interact in meatspace more and in the digital space less.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#864

Post by dinfinity »

ericmay wrote: post #854
dinfinity wrote: post #852

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not advocating for this. You're not advocating for it because murdering people is highly immoral and illegal. That answers your question for the most part. You also have to remember that the magnitude and speed of this stuff is very new to pretty much everybody . It's not exactly trivial to go from "I'm just doing my job" to "I need to kill everybody in my company to save the world" in a year or two, especially…

> You're not advocating for it because it is highly immoral and illegal. That answers your question for the most part. Well truthfully I’m not advocating for it because I don’t have any insight into these labs or the true capability of these models. But as a hypothetical if someone knew with 100% certainty that Big AI Button was being built and it would kill all humans or destroy all of humanity there is no moral amb…

> But as a hypothetical if someone knew with 100% certainty [...]

This is an unreasonable demand. The quitting employee in this case said this:

"I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable. I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities. If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because “it’s happening anyway” - or take this moment to call for different conditions?"

You demand that he should kill multiple people rather than quit his job because he believes the above. This guy doesn't want to be part of the problem and may very well go on to advocate strongly against what's happening from outside Anthropic.

> I agree with you, which is also why I think “omg I’m quitting they’re going to kill everyone” or other sort of sensationalized comment

You didn't read what he wrote, did you? Because that sensationalized comment seems to have originated entirely in your head.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#865

Post by dartos »

This same username with the same profile pic has an instagram account from Japan with next to no posts that just became active the other day posting AGI doomer rants like this…

If anyone takes this seriously… maybe it’s better AI does your thinking for you…

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#866

Post by ericmay »

dinfinity wrote: post #864
ericmay wrote: post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're not advocating for it because it is highly immoral and illegal. That answers your question for the most part. Well truthfully I’m not advocating for it because I don’t have any insight into these labs or the true capability of these models. But as a hypothetical if someone knew with 100% certainty that Big AI Button was being built and it would kill all humans or destroy all of humanity there is no moral amb…

> But as a hypothetical if someone knew with 100% certainty [...] This is an unreasonable demand. The quitting employee in this case said this: "I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable. I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on…

  > This is an unreasonable demand.
I'm not making a demand, I'm setting an anchor point from which we can work backward from. Is there any doubt that if someone was 100% certain that Big AI Button was being built and it would kill all humans that said person has a moral obligation to do everything they can to stop the button from being built and pressed?

  > "You demand that he should kill multiple people rather than quit his job because he believes the above. This guy doesn't want to be part of the problem and may very well go on to advocate strongly against what's happening from outside Anthropic."
Horse Shit. Here's what was written [1]:

  "The people building Al earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt."
> You didn't read what he wrote, did you? Because that sensationalized comment seems to have originated entirely in your head.

Look in the mirror.

[1] https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476203863224394

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#867

Post by hendrikmans »

What people here don't seem to understand is that with this new technology - and in fact any new technology - for unplanned catastrophe, it doesn't need this new technology to be super competent, but just the involved humans to be incompetent.

The question is not "will AI ever be so intelligent that it will murder us?", but "when will some moron be asleep at the console while the agent swarm discovered that pinging the Pentagon on port 666 launches all nukes"

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#868

Post by internet_points »

shafyy wrote: post #848
internet_points wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One the one hand, it does sound like one of those movies. On the other, Idiocracy turned out to be quite prescient. (Most likely, we'll have some combination of human stupidity, LLM stupidity, and way too much compute in one place all working together to create a perfect storm of unchecked hacks that break something or other that ends up killing people in an unintended way. Then there's some half-hearted attempt at c…

Not saying that the current civilizations will never end or be shattered to pieces. Looking at history, many civilizations did. But saying LLMs are the highest risk factor for this is just insanity, based on all what we have seen so far (and based on these AI companies crying wolf, I mean, remember just a few months ago that Anthropic saying that Fable is too powerful to be released?)

Oh, I agree. I don't think LLMs will end civilization. I'm guessing climate change will cause many more deaths than LLMs. But I think LLMs will cause some too. (And not in one of those impressively smart ways as it's presented from the OpenAI fearmongers, just in a stupid "we vibe-coded the sandbox for our bruteforce SCADA-hacking agent experiment and oh no it did what we told it to do" way.)

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#869

Post by DangitBobby »

SupremumLimit wrote: post #798
philipallstar wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Capitalism cannot do otherwise. I really think this sort of claim needs to stop. Capitalism, like "patriarchy" is not a force in its own right. Capitalism is a system that encourages value creation for one's customers. That's not perfect, but it's still best so far.

"value creation for one's customers" - that is a "not even wrong" level of misunderstanding of the system dynamics of capitalism. The primary driver is generation of _profit_ for owners of the means of production. Many things fall out of that - the tendency to monopolise, for example.

It really doesn't have to be that way. The problem boils down to, as with practically all human systems, is human behavior. There is no system you can devise that is run by humans and not corruptible and exploitable by the worst of us. Or even just everyday people.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#870

Post by skulk »

deaux wrote: post #335
skulk wrote: 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.

Explain why? How does live being worth living binarily depend on having a cushy software job?

I've seen how people work in manual labor type jobs (all that will be left, right?). They're worked to the bone and paid peanuts. It's a wretched existence for someone soft like me.
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