It really is beyond the pale to threaten a private company in this way outside of war time. It's an unthinkable overreach.
The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic
171–180 of 247 posts
Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic
#172My belief is they are terrified of China and this seems evident when you take into account the moves they're making with Venezuela, Iran, and the increased adoption of authoritarian tactics. We're trying to play catch-up with China's rapid rise as a super-power and the AI infrastructure is one of the few major developments we still have control over, for now. I sympathize with Dario, he's stuck in a very bad position…
If they are terrified of China why aren't they doing more diplomacy or at minimum, not allow NVIDIA to sell their chips to them?
Sorry but the China scare tactics is just more cold war nonsense. The idea China as a serious threat to anyone in the world where you have the USA invading countries (invading Iraq based on lies), kidnapping Presidents (Venezula), assassinating various leaders (drone strikes), abusing democratic ideals (Patriot act, PRISM, parallel construction, using banned chemical weapons against their own civilians; the USA has been a huge threat against the world and itself for the last 25 years.
Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic
#173On the one hand it's fantastic that people are resisting and, if nothing else, raising awareness and buying time. On the other hand, is autonomous war not obviously the endgame, given how quickly capabilities are increasing and that it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger? It just needs one player to do it, so everyone ha…
> It just needs one player to do it, so everyone has to be able to do it. Businesses stay out of potentially profitable market segments for various reasons, so I don't think everyone has to be able to do it to survive.
We are constantly told how the board has a fiduciary responsibility to make investors money to overrule these various reasons.
Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic
#174This whole standoff could set a very important precedent of the Trump administration not getting what they want, and not in a "maneuvered out of the news spotlight" kind of way (e.g. Greenland), but in a public "FUCK OFF right in your face" kind of way. The worst that can happen to Anthropic is one of the two things mentioned; loosing some contracts or some fake forced management from the Pentagon. maybe Dario having…
> The worst that can happen to Anthropic The corporate death sentence usually goes something like "anyone who does business with Anthropic cannot do business with the US government". That pretty much means all the hyperscalers, major infrastructure providers, major software providers, and major corporations. They all have to choose between the entire US gov and all those contracts and a single AI company. That's the…
I hope this happens because it gives the next democratic administration more ammunition in abolishing corporate supremacy.
Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
With a malevolent agent in the bully pulpit deliberately swamping the American zeitgeist with hostile nonsense ( "flood the zone with shit" ), it has become every American's duty to be on guard to avoid propagating the regime's bullshit. We are indeed at war, an information war of the US elites against We The People. So buck up.
I'm not american, and further, whether a department name change is a primary name change, or an alias slapped on, seems pretty low on the list of things to care about.
Is your argument that you're not involved enough in American politics to have responsible opinions about it, even though you're involved enough to comment in the first place?
I agree this in isolation is low stakes. The problem is the volume. The memetic assault is everywhere you turn, and propagating it helps the regime. And yes, it's far too easy to do accidentally. That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate others calling it out.
Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elections won't be canceled. They're too important for the perception of legitimacy. Virtually every country on Earth now has elections. Russia, China, even North Korea has elections. The modern playbook isn't to abolish elections, it's a combination of blocking opposition candidates, suppressing votes, intimidating voters, and lying about the results. That's what to watch for.
It's fairly easy to abuse a state of exception to cancel elections. Ukraine has done it, and it's been, along with banning opposition parties and attempting to imprison critics (Arestovych, etc.), a critical step in their government consolidating power.
Ukraine's constitution doesn't allow elections when martial law is in effect. The US constitution has no such clause, nor anything else that would allow for delaying or canceling elections.
That's not to say it can't be done, but there's a huge difference in difficulty between doing what the country's constitution says, and doing the opposite. Especially in a country where elections are run by sovereign governments not under the control of the central government.
Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anthropic wanted those sweet, sweet, taxpayer dollars The sold services to a willing counterparty at mutually agreed upon terms. And now the other side of that deal has recalled that they're Twelve and You're Not My Real Mom You Can't Tell Me What To Do, and so wishes they had agreed to different terms and is throwing a tantrum to attempt to force a change. And that's Anthropic's fault? That's a risk they should ha…
> The sold services to a willing counterparty at mutually agreed upon terms. Yeah, and the legal environment that contract was written in, which both parties were aware of during negotiation, defines the means by which those terms can be changed. > And that's Anthropic's fault? That's a risk they should have predicted? It is deeply funny to me to imagine that an AI company doing inference at an unprecedented scale co…
> preemptively refuses to deliver
See this is your confusion. They're not refusing to deliver, they're happy to provide the services agreed to at the rate negotiated. What they're refusing is a change in the terms.
If you contract me to build you a building, and I agree with a stipulation that it won't be used as a slaughterhouse (and that you'll write that into the deed), you can't compel me to continue building if you change your mind on that point six months in. You either break the contract subject to agreed terms, renegotiate to remove that clause, or stop breaching the contract.
Of all American claims to exceptionalism, one that rings closest to true is that the the people AND the government are all bound by the rule of law. Contracting with the government is no different than contracting with any other party.
Your point seems to be "but it's the government clearly they can do whatever they want lol" viz. DPA, Supply-Chain risk, etc. You're right that they have those powers. But accepting/asserting that the capricious, vengeful, use of those extraordinary powers should be an anticipated, normal feature of contracting with the government runs counter to what should be among our highest shared values. We might as well jump directly to the authoritarian logic 'they have the army, they can compel anything they want for $0, so just give them what they ask'.
Furthermore, one presumes Anthropic did see this coming, given no more evidence than that this is playing out in a giant public fracas making their values clear to all their possible customers the world over, instead of over a tense email thread between the assistant to the sub-under-deputy secretary for AI procurement and a half-dozen lawyers in SF.
(addenda: you're going to say we've used the DPA a bunch. I would argue that vanishingly few instances have compelled private enterprise to act in direct opposition to their own interests; an even in those cases they were just being asked to lose money (meatpackers, PG&E suppliers, ...))
Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
turns out lots of people "know" that the president has no say in the affairs of US states running elections
What are the states going to do with their local election results when the officials in Washington ignore them due to some manufactured state of emergency? He already tried to get specific states' election outcomes discarded from the count on Jan 6, 2021.
Could you be more specific on who the officials in DC would be that could ignore the election results? The Clerk of the House, I assume? They have a fairly limited role, and it would probably be a short-lived disruption. The members-elect themselves seem to have all of the power, if my civics knowledge is correct.
Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> many are willing to see him trample there is little surprising about it Trump is pushing in the direction of an Oligarchie, billionaires would be the future oligarchs. So even iff a billionaire is no-okay with this development, if they stick out they - will lose their status/money iff Trump wins long term - will make enemies with many other billionaires, but a core trend of billionaires is taking advantage of conne…
Given there are only ~1135 billionaires in the USA right now, I'd say it's pretty much non-viable to go from sub/barely millionaire to billionaire period. But Taylor Swift doesn't seem to have murdered any kittens to get where she is nor did Rihanna so it can happen without totally selling out.
yesn't
my argument was more about becoming a billionaire by creating bringing a company to a level of success where they dominate their area of business.
I.e. not getting there by "fame" or "pure luck" (lets say you got 1/42th of early bitcoin from a "fun" project in the very early bitcoin days or similar).
Let's also for simplicity ignore that getting there by "fame" often involve tight cooperation with companies/people which don't care about ethics much. Through you might be able to separate yourself once you reach success, most times they try to make sure you can't.
And even iff you didn't compromise your ethics when becoming a billionaire this doesn't change the core argument.
That is if (as billionaire) you passively go with a push to Oligarchy you are unlikely to suffer from it. But if you don't and the Oligarchy wins, then you likely suffer a lot.
I.e. if you go with a non-emotional/non-ideology considering risk/benefit analysis passively yielding wins. Both for money and power.
In such a situation a lot of people will just go with it, no matter if billionaire or not.
Re: The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger? I could not disagree more. A big part of that is also knowing when NOT to pull the trigger. And it’s much harder than you’d think. If you think full self driving is a difficult task for computers, battlefield operations are an order of magnitude more complex, at least.
We have fully autonomous weapons, and had them for over a century. We call them "landmines". I expect autonomous weapons of the near future to look somewhat similar to that. They get deployed to an area, attack anything that looks remotely like a target there for a given time, then stand down and return to base. That's it. The job of the autonomous weapon platform isn't telling friend from foe - it's disposing of eve…
Well, I assume that they are at least not to attack their autonomous "comrades". Masquerading as such will be one obvious tactic, no ? You could argue that these guys would use e2e encrypted messages as FOF designation, but I would imagine a contested area would be blanketed with jammers, leaving only other options (light ? but smokescreens. Audio? Also easily jammed). So this isn't as easy as most people think.
Edit: No, I don't think a purely defensive stance like landmines is sufficient and what the people in command think.
We have landmines today. Why spend much more making marginally better, highly intelligent ones with LLMs?