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Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

time.com

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Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#161

Post by pjc50 »

zer00eyz wrote: post #22
chris_money202 wrote: post #11

First they rushed a model to market without safety checks, and I said nothing. It wasn't my field. Then they ignored the researchers warning about what it could do, and I said nothing. It sounded like science fiction. Then they gave it control of things that matter, power grids, hospitals, weapons, and I said nothing. It seemed to be working fine. Then something went wrong, and no one knew how to stop it, no one had…

> Then something went wrong, and no one knew how to stop it, This is the problem with every AI safety scenario like this. It has a level of detachment from reality that is frankly stark. If linesman stop showing up to work for a week, the power goes out. The US has show that people with "high powered" rifles can shut down the grid. We are far far away from a sort of world where turning AI off is a problem. There isnt…

> There isnt going to be a HAL or Terminator style situation

The threat isn't HAL, but ICE. Not AI as some sort of unique evil, but as a force multiplier for extremely human - indeed, popular - forms of evil. I'm sure someone will import the Chinese idea of the ethnicity-identifying security camera, for example.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#162

Post by Noaidi »

Rapzid wrote: post #73

How is this article not going to even mention the recent threats to Anthropic from the Government?!

I mean seriously, is this not the very definition of fascism?

"n general, fascist governments exercised control over private property but they did not nationalize it. Scholars also noted that big business developed an increasingly close partnership with the Italian Fascist and German Nazi governments after they took power. Business leaders supported the government's political and military goals. In exchange, the government pursued economic policies that maximized the profits of its business allies.[8]"

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#163

Post by gehwartzen »

davidguetta wrote: post #160
latexr wrote: post #151

> “We felt that it wouldn't actually help anyone for us to stop training AI models,” How magnanimous! They are only thinking of others, you see. They are rejecting their safety pledge for you . > “We didn't really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments … if competitors are blazing ahead.” Oops, said the quiet part out loud that it’s all about money. “I mean, if al…

[flagged]

Well we teach kids not to yell “Fire!” In a crowded theatre or “N***!“ at their neighbor. We also teach our industrial machines to distinguish between fingers and bolts, our cars to not say “make a left turn now” when on a bridge, etc

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#164

Post by apothegm »

hedayet wrote: post #100

Developments like this make me less interested in building a "successful" tech company. It increasingly feels like operating at that scale can require compromises I’m not comfortable making. Maybe that’s a personal limitation—but it’s one I’m choosing to keep. I’d genuinely love to hear examples of tech companies that have scaled without losing their ethical footing. I could use the inspiration.

If you want to be able to retain ethics, among other things make sure not to take the company public. Then you’re basically legally required to drop ethics in favor of profits.

Also don’t take investment from anyone who isn’t fully aligned ethically. Be skeptical of promises from people you don’t personally know extremely well.

That may limit you to slower growth, or cap your growth (fine if you want to run a company and take home $2M/ye from it; not fine if you want to be acquired for $100M and retire.) It may also limit you to taking out loans to fund growth that you can’t bootstrap to, which is a different kind of risky.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#165

Post by sebastiennight »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #50
ashtonshears wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The societal ills from collective tendancy to ignore red flags seems to be a human trait

It's in your nature to destroy yourselves

For the downvoters and anyone born after 1991: see https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InYourNatureToDe...

and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF_4EWSuzQY

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#166

Post by sebastiennight »

elric wrote: post #84
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in your nature to destroy yourselves

Defeatist bullshit becomes self-fulfilling at some point. "Oh we're all gonna die anyway so we might as well milk this thing for profit. Après moi la déluge."

*"le" déluge

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#167

Post by apothegm »

jedberg wrote: post #66
XorNot wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lotta just following orders going around in the US right now.

This isn’t just following orders. This was the government using its might to force a business to do what it wants. This should concern you.

Two sides of the same filthy coin, in a way.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#168

Post by sebastiennight »

lebovic wrote: post #156

I used to work at Anthropic. I fully believe that the folks mentioned in the article, like Jared Kaplan, are well-intentioned and concerned about the relationship between safety research and frontier capabilities – not purely profit. That said, I'm not thrilled about this. I joined Anthropic with the impression that the responsible scaling policy was a binding pre-commitment for exactly this scenario: they wouldn't s…

> I joined Anthropic with the impression that the responsible scaling policy was a binding pre-commitment for exactly this scenario

Pledges are generally non-binding (you can pledge to do no evil and still do it), but fulfill an important function as a signal: actively removing your public pledge to do "no evil" when you could have acted as you wished anyway, switches the market you're marketing to. That's the most worrying part IMO.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#169

Post by sebastiennight »

sega_sai wrote: post #149
consp wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of them had shareholders to please.

I don't believe anthropic has shareholders either. It is not a public company

If you take investments, your investors will most likely own shares of the company (except in specific early-stage scenarios like YC's SAFE). Sometimes major investors will have board seats or voting shares. This happens in normal private companies, not just public ones.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#170

Post by haritha-j »

Who could've seen that one coming? Honestly, if you want to do profit maximising AI research at the cost of humanity, go for it. Its all this fake preaching about how they want to save the world from all the other bad AI companies that really irks me.
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