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We must pace the frontier

darioamodei.com

821–830 of 937 posts

Re: We must pace the frontier

#821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're already seeing anti-AI sentiments, but the movement is still fringe with a vocal minority. However, that'll change soon without alignment. Without self-intervention, there will invariably be future incidents that can cause major economic impact, leaked private data, loss of life (directly/indirectly) etc. Once that happens, their social capital is wiped. It'll be an avalanche of lawsuits and overzealous regulat…

I don’t think the anti-AI sentiment is as fringe as you think. At least not outside the tech world it isn’t..

Ya, I wish I saved a link to it but an HN'r wrote a good beefy comment about this. TL;DR, AI has been exponentially more useful, and exponentially more accepted, in tech circles than anywhere else. Certainly there are lots of people outside of tech who are obsessed with it. I don't have any data here, but it seems the majority of these are the wannabe artists who are generating music and images, and people who use it for companionship (both of these scenarios I'm personally very uncomfortable with, but that's just me). And of course, there are people who use it to make their jobs way easier who say they are getting a days' work done in an hour (I see you), and to that I'd say to enjoy it while it lasts. Eventually your bosses will catch up and it's very likely their expectations of you will skyrocket. Remember that computers in general were supposed to "make us work less."

Re: We must pace the frontier

#822
The way he talks about OAI-HF, even the abbreviation, is lol. They will do anything to sell this "incident" as a "danger". The ego on these people is the real existential threat to civilization.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#823
post #588

This may come out of left field, but Dario seems terrified to be in charge. I don't get the impression that he ever had a desire to run a company like this. Now that he's a CEO, he keeps trying to make uncompetitive decisions and calls for someone (anyone) to stop him. It regularly blunts Anthropic's edge. It's the only explanation I can see when it's obvious to any student of history this is going to backfire. It do…

Then he should resign

Re: We must pace the frontier

#824
post #44

> We have sought a middle way: to show that it’s possible to build carefully and succeed commercially, and to make safety something on which AI companies compete. In other words, to create a race to the top > Transparency. Regardless of what commitments we make, the public deserves to know what is going on. Anthropic has been a supporter of transparency for a long time And then it goes on tangent of how we should pac…

> Suppose it was, I don't know, Australia producing SOTA open weights, because they believed it was the right thing to do for the benefits of humanity - would Dario propose making Australia a geopolitical adversary too? I'd expect he thinks that people are capable of realizing that AI is very dangerous and also that democracies end up mostly representing the will of the people, from which it follows that Hypothetical…

> This argument doesn't work for countries which don't care what their citizens want, like China.

you didn’t have to use China as an example, the US clearly does not care what its citizens want as the most popular policies are never even discussed or proposed in congress

meanwhile, China destroying their housing market to decommidify it so everyone can have housing…they seem to care about their people more

Re: We must pace the frontier

#825
The answer to all ai worries is quite simple. Ai is a technology. While 'agents'may be deployed, the law simply needs to be clear as to who the human agent is who will be held responsible criminally..

Suddenly every problem solves itself.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#826

The way he talks about OAI-HF, even the abbreviation, is lol. They will do anything to sell this "incident" as a "danger". The ego on these people is the real existential threat to civilization.

Same feeling about the way he refers to “democratic” and “authoritarian” countries. Even if I don’t agree with China politics adding tags in this context is not helpful.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regardless of whether you think they're right, most everyone at Anthropic is acting in good faith. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Dario Amodei is a 40-something dude who is obviously very, very intelligent. But intelligence is not wisdom and his "essay" here can easily be read as someone who opened a can of worms and doesn't know (or can't accept) that he won't be able to put the worms back in. But…

I see what you mean. I meant more that they genuinely believe the tech is dangerous, not that they are necessarily doing the right thing.

If they genuinely believe the tech is dangerous, how would it be acting in "good faith" to keep developing it, prepping an IPO, etc.?

Re: We must pace the frontier

#828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alignment just means "this machine operates in ways that align with the intent of its users". It doesn't imply anything about the inscrutability of the machine in question. A gun with a misaligned scope would likewise fail to operate in accord with its user's intent, and likewise with potentially deadly consequences.

The gun comes with a manual on how to use it safely. I'm sure it has some complexities, but at the high level: > A gun is a metal tube that uses a tiny, controlled explosion to shoot a small piece of metal (called a bullet) forward at very high speed. If the gun doesn't work as intended, you can take it to a shop and someone can fix it so it works as designed. All I'm saying is AI should be designed the same way. Tre…

Learning ML, there was a high emphasis on the error part of things as most of the course was on minimizing errors. After ChatGPT, there is a weird anthropomorphization going on, where it's all about hallucinations, alignment and what not.

We have something that is statistical in nature so there should never been any expectation of error-free results/actions. The value has always been about discerning trends or the cost of errors being way lower than any good result.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose I showed you a number of climate change NGOs which shared staff and funding sources. Could we therefore conclude that their motives aren't genuine? Suppose a big foundation both funded clean energy technology, and also NGOs encouraging people to decarbonize. Is this just a cynical attempt to rig the game in their favor?

Pure cope. > Suppose a big foundation both funded clean energy technology, and also NGOs encouraging people to decarbonize. Is this just a cynical attempt to rig the game in their favor? Not comparable. The clean energy technology company wouldn't be trying to create an environment where no one else can create clean energy technology, or where only they are the ones who can decide how clean energy technology is creat…

Oh, would you look at that, 1 day before Dario's blog post, Joe Benton leaves Anthropic with the same fear campaign playbook, gets blasted all over the media, and declares he is joining METR to do independent eval of risks.

So, put your employees in METR -> offer to have them work in your office as an "unbiased" third party evaluator.

Get real.

Re: We must pace the frontier

#830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what are the reasons to use Claude Code anymore when there are so many other (allegedly better) OpenSource harnesses out there? Personally I've been using https://pi.dev for long and never looked back.

Because you basically get a discount to use claude code via subscription when using an anthropic model, compared to what you pay via api billing with another harness

Understood.

Personally that's actually another good reason to boycott Anthropic: beside the fact I perceive their models as (at best) marginally better than the ones I'm used to (Z.ai glm-5.3-flash, DeepSeek Flash v4.1), they even force me to use their bloated harness. They are not even open weights and iirc they're even encrypting chain of thoughts now? Litterally, from my perspective there seems to be no reason whatsoever to choose any of the leading US providers, they're not even competing on price.

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