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Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

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Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#161
post #141
post #92

@pg on @sama: "you could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king." In retrospect this quote comes across as way more foreboding given what we've learned about the scale of his ambitions and his willingness to lie and bend reality to gain power. Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era. I hope he remains strong in the f…

>Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era. Anthropic actually partnered up with Palantir. They are not the saints you think they are, either. We should stop worshipping people and companies and stop putting them on pedestals. Just because one party is at fault, doesn't mean the other is automatically innocent. These are all for-profit companies at play here. https://inve…

If you look at his comments about Palantir and their proposed safeguards, it's clear it's a case of "if you are dining with the Devil, you'd better bring a very long spoon"

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#162
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know how this story will end for Dario. See Oppenheimer, Turing, Lavoisier, Galileo, Socretes etc. Power does not reside in the hands of people with knowledge or even wealth. And most technical people have not taken a political philosophy course or even a philosphy course. The Ring of Gyges story is 4000 years old.

I think Amodei is widely underestimated. The consensus viewpoint on the deal that OpenAI struck with the Pentagon is that Anthropic got played. I disagree. I'm certain that Amodei and his team gamed this out. In doing so, I think there's at least two conclusions they would have drawn: 1. Some other AI company would cut a deal with the Pentagon. There's no world in which all the labs boycott the Pentagon. So who? Choo…

> Choosing Grok would be bad for the US

They chose Grok and OpenAI. The story was drowned out by the Anthropic controversy, but an xAI deal was signed the same week.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#163

It's easy to frame this purely as an ethical battle, but there's a massive financial reality here. Training frontier models requires astronomical amounts of capital, and the DOD is one of the few entities with deep enough pockets to fund the next generation of compute. Anthropic turning down this Pentagon contract over safety disagreements is a huge gamble. They are essentially betting that the enterprise market will…

It’s a $200M contract. That’s not nothing but it’s definitely not such a huge sum for these companies at their scale when they’re spending billions on infrastructure. I’m sure anthropic has signed up more revenue this week in response to this debacle to cover it. Where they’re actually screwed is if the gov follows through and declare anthropic a supply chain risk.

That is with the Pentagon directly only. Now they will lose much more because no defense contractor, subcontractor and so on can use them for anything defense related (even if they use the model to invent a new type of screw, if that screw is going to be used in anything military).

So yeah, they bet a whole lot on “look at us, we have morals”.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OAI conditions were basically "DoW won't do anything which violates the rules DoW sets for itself." I believe this understanding is correct. The issue many people have these days with Dept. of War, and most of Trump admin is that they have little respect for laws. They only follow the ones they like and openly ignore the ones that are inconvenient. Dept of "War" should have zero problems agreeing to the two conditi…

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If I start a small business that sells Apples and the US government comes to me and says "we want to buy your apples and fire them at high speed to" these are now your words "kill adversaries through any means necessary."

If I say, no, then am I stopping the military?

I feel like it is reasonable that I can say "no, I don't want to sell you my apples."

I cannot for the life of me figure out why that means I am stopping the military from killing people. The US Military will definitely still be able to kill people for centuries. I'm just saying I don't want to participate in it.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#165
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no great love for Dario but his “talking shit” is literally making the point that what Altman is saying publicly is NOT actually in defense or praise of Anthropic and is a calculating, manipulative tactic. Which is intended to muddy the waters about Anthropic’s actual position vs OpenAI’s, and portray himself as a conciliator (for the audience of DoD/Trump) who is still bound by equally strong ethics (as a fig…

At least as it's presented in the article, there's no more reason to believe Amodei than there is Altman and Altman is presenting it in a less impassioned way which makes him more believable to anyone who doesn't have in-depth knowledge of the situation. Going "what he's saying is straight up lies" is no more evidence backed than Altman claiming he asked the DoD to have Anthropic given the same deal as OAI and have t…

Altman was fired by his own board for lying to them. Just because Microsoft blackmailed them into reversing this decision by threatening financial ruin does not change that.

You don't give habitual liars the benefit of doubt.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not hypocritical at all if you knew what Palantir actually does

Help kill people[1]? [1] -- https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/07/24/thiel-pal...

Anthropic doesn't have an issue with their technology "helping kill people," so correct, that would not be hypocritical.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#167
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is crazy. You are suggesting that corporations should have no power over their own IP. Are you really saying that if Anthropic sells a limited version of their product to Palantir at a certain price, the government should be able to demand access to an unlimited version of Anthropic's product for free because they are a customer of Palantir? That would effectively mean the government gets an unlimited license to…

Imagine if a gun manufacturer sold weapons to the military but said "don't use them is unjustified wars as we deem fit" seems wrong as we dont want gun manufacturers setting our foreign policy. Choose not to sell them sure, but this isn't "ownership of IP". If the feds were to ask for weights and torrent it out, sure IP. But this ain't that

Guns aren’t a service, which is what Anthropic sells.

Anthropic has a contract for how their service is to be used, the government committed itself to following the contract by signing. Then it violated the contract.

Basically the government committed fraud by signing a contract that it clearly intended to violate. Then they tried to bully Anthropic into not doing anything about their breach of contract.

It’s mobster behavior. You’re saying Anthropic should just not sell services if it’s going to enforce the terms of service. You have it backwards: the government shouldn’t enter into contracts that it intends to violate.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OAI conditions were basically "DoW won't do anything which violates the rules DoW sets for itself." I believe this understanding is correct. The issue many people have these days with Dept. of War, and most of Trump admin is that they have little respect for laws. They only follow the ones they like and openly ignore the ones that are inconvenient. Dept of "War" should have zero problems agreeing to the two conditi…

[flagged]

Any company is free to choose its business partners and set terms to them. "Don't like our terms, don't partner with us"

If government can force any private company to work specially for government then US is no better than PRC

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very easy to explain. Anthropic outlines some limitations in their terms of service. Palantir accepted those terms. The DoD did not. OpenAI claims their terms of service for DoD contain the same limitations as Anthropics proposed service agreement. Anthropic claims that this is untrue. Now given that (a) the DoD terminated their deal with Anthropic, (b) stated that they terminated because Anthropic refused mo…

Yeah, it never made sense when Sam immediately said that they had the same constraints yet de DoW immediately agreed with that. From what I can see, OpenAI’s terms basically say “need to comply with the law”, which provides them with plenty of wiggle room with executive orders and whatnot.

I think they said they will comply with the law and Pentagon policies.

And:

1. there is no law currently prohibiting autonomous weapons platforms

2. the Pentagon can create policies overnight allowing all kinds of stuff

So yeah, OpenAI is going to make a lot of money from actually doing what the military asks from them.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#170
post #141
post #92

@pg on @sama: "you could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king." In retrospect this quote comes across as way more foreboding given what we've learned about the scale of his ambitions and his willingness to lie and bend reality to gain power. Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era. I hope he remains strong in the f…

>Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era. Anthropic actually partnered up with Palantir. They are not the saints you think they are, either. We should stop worshipping people and companies and stop putting them on pedestals. Just because one party is at fault, doesn't mean the other is automatically innocent. These are all for-profit companies at play here. https://inve…

I've heard Palantir is essentially the only federal cloud vendor with this administration for secure services. By "partnered up with Palantir", do you mean they provided their models to the government? Or something more?
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