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We must pace the frontier

darioamodei.com

71–80 of 941 posts

Re: We must pace the frontier

#71

"I believe that AI could [...] usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom" How exactly? So far AI has accelerated misinformation at scale and wealth concentration.

AI at least with its current compute and data requirements seems structurally undemocratic to me.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#72
The public discourse on this is incredibly poisoned, but the naked reality is:

1. Artificial intelligence is clearly a vastly dangerous technology with plausible potential for human extinction.

2. This scares people.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#73

It is always like that. Whenever anthropic hits some wall (like now beaing beaten by astra) - there comes some article like that. Seen that enough times.

Yesterday the same arguments were used about OpenAI when Sam Altman said something similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49652270

It gets to the point that by Occam's Razor the more likely and reasonable explanation is that Dario Amodei and Sam Altman are just actually afraid of the disastrous impact ASI may have on the world, and that the race they're in is not good, and calling for help to governments in form of regulation and an international treaty.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#74

I know the common take online is that this is Anthropic doing pre-IPO marketing. I don’t think it is. I think Dario is genuinely afraid of the inevitability of AI turning into internet slime mold: consuming the environment, turning it into its own playground, and eventually manipulating human culture along with it. So am I. That said, if slowing this down were possible, I think it would have happened by now. Maybe he…

The more I read about everything that has been written regarding AI regulation since the OAI/HF incident, and the more it reminds me of the nuclear arms race (although the potential consequences would possibly be very different). Surely, we managed to negotiate a Non-Proliferation Treaty with most of the countries of the globe. Cannot we take inspiration from that for AI?

It's way easier to train a model on existing data centers in secret than it is to acquire uranium and plutonium and start a nuclear program

Re: We must pace the frontier

#75
Distillation is a great thing for consumers. It improves competition and reduces the massive moats that OpenAI and Anthropic have in compute that would otherwise lead them to be duopolists. It’s also only fair that AIs trained on humanity’s wealth of knowledge for Pennie’s allow competition to train on humanity’s wealth of knowledge at market cost.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#76
post #47

Don't buy this argument. It's like saying, we lords who hold this capital will build all this economically destructive stuff anyway, and wait for the world to not react to our stupid ways of enriching yourselves. People are not going to slow down because this was brought to them on less than endearing terms. They don't see any of these stated noble intentions. Claude was already used to cause economic, political and…

I also don’t buy the arguments. The arguments about helping humanity cure diseases as if those are some of the leading Causes of suffering. The bar is so low that we don’t event need to cure diseases, we just need to lift the entire floor with basic solutions like: housing for everyone, continued education on healthy eating and just general continued education on like living. Life coaches so many very basic things that don’t require a novel solution or a data center.

Solving a disease like cancer as justification for everything else seems like not a great trade off. I don’t say that to dismiss those who have lost people to cancer. But the technology just is being utilized in so many harmful ways and the things it enables: job loss, surveillance, misinformation, just feel like problems that aren’t worth it. Have we even heard of a solved diseases? If anything haven’t we heard that ai will make even worse bio warfare?

Re: We must pace the frontier

#77
I feel like this identical pitch could have been made 25 or 40 years ago talking about Internet technologies or personal computing, with very very similar warnings and suggestions. And had these been adopted then, it would have been more regulatory capture, less progress, and still have the same problems and risks that were warned about.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#78

I know the common take online is that this is Anthropic doing pre-IPO marketing. I don’t think it is. I think Dario is genuinely afraid of the inevitability of AI turning into internet slime mold: consuming the environment, turning it into its own playground, and eventually manipulating human culture along with it. So am I. That said, if slowing this down were possible, I think it would have happened by now. Maybe he…

The more I read about everything that has been written regarding AI regulation since the OAI/HF incident, and the more it reminds me of the nuclear arms race (although the potential consequences would possibly be very different). Surely, we managed to negotiate a Non-Proliferation Treaty with most of the countries of the globe. Cannot we take inspiration from that for AI?

[deleted]

Re: We must pace the frontier

#79

Why is the analogue necessarily the regulation and control of nuclear weapons (e.g., SALT) and not, for example, that of bioweapons? Some very different paths are available. On both I would note that the private sector has only a limited role, though.

I'm curious to hear more about the differences in how bioweapons are regulated vs nuclear weapons.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#80
post #45
post #8

I enjoy Claude Code very much, have max privately and team premium at work, but the doomer marketing and this whole regulate-while-we're-ahead spiel is extremely annoying and makes me wish Anthropic gets trounced.

The degradation, polarization, and weaponization of or media landscape over the era of social media has left us utterly incapable of believing anything that anybody says. Dario in particular has consistently been risk-wary on model improvements for going on a decade - long before he was CEO of Anthropic. He believes what he is saying. Human beings can plainly say things that they think are true. Not every utterance b…

We've had enough utterances from "effective altruists" to know what they say and claim to believe is a cynical ploy.
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