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Did Anthropic ask for this?

verysane.ai

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Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#121

Post by estearum »

ivraatiems wrote: post #11

Maybe this will be simpler for Anthropic to understand if they take their own high-minded philosophical nonsense and ego out of it and consider it the way a neutral party would. Suppose a company calls themselves The Doomsday Device Company. They make and sell excellent-quality doomsday devices. They regularly go online to proclaim that their doomsday devices are the best and most powerful, and also that doomsday dev…

Yes this is also why if you're building a startup in the nuclear power space (empirically demonstrated Doomsday Device), then you can expect USG to come in and apply arbitrary, opaque, and unexplained rules on you, steal your assets, and destroy your business. And also probably not do that to any of your competitors who are doing the exact same thing as you.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#122

Post by fwipsy »

resident423 wrote: post #88
ivraatiems wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if you take these risks seriously, which the median commentor on HN obviously doesn't, what is the right thing to do? Easy. You oppose it. You dedicate all your resources to stopping not just OpenAI, but anybody trying to make these technologies. With all those billions of dollars, you could get a lot done. Anthropic doesn't do this, which exposes the fundamental hypocrisy in their stated philosophies.

It seems like a simple solution but if Anthropic was actually to dedicate all its resources this way wouldn't the investors just demand a new CEO? I think Anthropic believe these risks, but I also think they've spent so much time talking to Claude that they've pretty much lost their minds now. Anthropic have a model welfare department and have numerous times suggested that Claude is conscious and has human like emoti…

"Are AIs conscious?" is not currently answerable because "Are humans conscious?" is not currently answerable. I know I'm conscious because I perceive (it) directly. Everyone else's consciousness basically depends on an assumption; on taking them at their word when they say they're conscious. Now I ask an AI if it's conscious and it says it doesn't know, but it sorta thinks it might be. Okay, it's probably not conscious, but it's difficult to rule out in the same way a book is not conscious.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#123

Post by estearum »

whatisthiseven wrote: post #114
fwipsy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic has called for a coordinated pause: https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-says-ai-labs-need... I characterize the culture of companies based on who works there. Anthropic is founded by people who left OpenAI because it didn't take safety seriously enough. But if AI development has to happen, they want to be the ones leading it. People who do not feel that way, including Anthropic's former head of safet…

Ok, but that only benefits them. If they actually believe this stuff is so dangerous, they should shut down their company, and use their fortune to buy up/shut down all the others. But of course they don't actually believe that. It is just marketing hype. You can't be out there selling doomsday devices, saying "maybe we should slow down development of bigger doomsday devices", while *still selling doomsday devices".…

@gork what is a coordination problem and can you just like "shut down your participation" and solve them?

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#124

Post by sothatsit »

Would the US government have slapped Anthropic with this export control if Anthropic never fearmonger'ed about Mythos? I think the answer is very likely no.

But is this the type of regulation Anthropic has been asking for? Not at all.

This is a failure of Anthropic's politicking, and a warning that they need to be more careful with their communication in the future. If they truly want constructive regulations because of their fears about AI, they will need to repair their relationship with the administration, and it is still unclear to me how they plan to do that.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#125

Post by estearum »

peter422 wrote: post #29

Anybody who isn't at least treating this situation as possibly just an authoritarian government picking winners and losers is not paying attention to the political environment. Companies/countries/people are paying off the government in all sorts of various ways (crypto, gifts, bogus settlements, planes, inaugurations, ballrooms). The companies that pay off the government get big fat contracts and merger agreements,…

Ah but you have forgotten that HN is full of people who are so aloof and "above the fray" (compliments to their raw intellect, of course) that it would be beneath them to consider the realities of the political situation.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#126

Post by fwipsy »

cdestroyer wrote: post #94
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #19

I posted this comment on the other thread, but it deserves mention here too, because Anthropic also asked for this ~10 days ago, separately from the post linked in the article. https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme ... > We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep u…

the link appears to be broken. Only shows a 404 poem :(

It's missing a "nt:" https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#127

Post by zmmmmm »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #99
zmmmmm wrote: post #74

I think it's a near universal phenomenon that people with extraordinary amounts of power become victims of their own hubris. Once you get sufficiently decoupled from the consequences of your own actions, it is near impossible to tether yourself to a calibrated sense of reality. So I genuinely think that Amodei thought here that he was building a moat - set a very high bar for safety at exactly the line Anthropic but…

> I am sure they calculated in the possibility of their own model being restricted. Doubt. Had they foreseen this, they would have started verifying the identity of their customers. That would have allowed them to keep their US customers when the US government banned foreign persons from accessing Fable. Since they were forced to turn off Fable for everyone , it follows that they were not prepared for that possibilit…

> they would have started verifying the identity of their customers.

Very good point. Yes i think this part goes to hubris. Amodei probably didn't think the ban would cut along those lines if it happened. And in fact it wouldn't surprise me if the government specifically made it that way (singling out foreign nationals) as a way of punishing Anthropic for putting them in this position. It's clear they absolutely hate being dictated to by anybody, but especially Amodei and they probably thought through what would hurt them a lot to implement and deliberately made it that way.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#128

Post by satvikpendem »

gerdesj wrote: post #110
satvikpendem wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what your personal anecdote has to do with general trends, there have always been hermits in history. I also run local models with llama.cpp but I actually stay abreast of the issues in the field as we may similarly be impacted by recent actions.

Silly me and my silly stories! HN is a forum and as far as I am aware, anecdata is allowed here. You might disagree with me and my experience and that is fine too but please don't denigrate me.

It is a forum, yes, and anecdotes are fine, as I said I do the same as you wrt local models, but that doesn't mean an irrelevant non sequitur is useful to other readers, and pointing it out is not equivalent to denigration.

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#129

Post by [deleted] »

airstrike wrote: post #58
ianm218 wrote: post #15

What I feel like is missing in the common discourse here is that Anthropic genuinely believes that AI poses an existential risk for humanity either in terms of literal survival or extreme mass surveillance, human disempowerment etc. So if you take these risks seriously, which the median commentor on HN obviously doesn't, what is the right thing to do? I.e. OpenAI just went full evil corpo mode and went all in on the…

We do not know for a fact what they genuinely believe, and many of us have seen companies act in opposition to their stated goals so the burden of proof is on them. It's healthy to suspect ulterior motives from them.

[deleted]

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this?

#130

Post by fwipsy »

dualvariable wrote: post #98

I tend to think this is all just PR and hype, baking in the idea that Fable/Mythos is so good that it attracted all these regulations and controls. So you need to spend >$20k per developer per month, or you'll fall behind. Don't try to get by on Opus, you need to really open that wallet up...

Most people at my company default to Opus 4.6. I personally use Sonnet for a lot of stuff.
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