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We Will Not Be Divided

notdivided.org

231–240 of 912 posts

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#231
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m tired of these bizarre hypothetical gotcha arguments. If AI can create bioweapons, it can equally create vaccines and antidotes to them. We live in a free society. AI should be democratized like any other technology.

Symmetry is not guaranteed. If someone creates a deadly pathogen with a long pre-symptomatic period (which we know is possible, since HIV works this way) it could infect essentially everyone before discovery. Yes, powerful AI would likely rapidly speed up the process of responding to the threat after detection, especially in designing countermeasures, but if we don't learn about the threat in time we lose. There are…

For every person that thinks about creating the HIV-like deadly pathogen, there will be millions more thinking about how to defend people against such pathogen, how to detect it faster before symptoms arise, how to put up barriers to creating them, and possibly even how to modify our bodies to be naturally resilient to all similar pathogens. Just like what you're doing here. I don't think we should mark knowledge or intelligence itself as the problem. If that's true then we should be making everyone dumber.

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#234
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It prohibits DoD agencies and contractors from using Anthropic services. It'd be one thing if the DoD simply didn't use Anthropic. This is literally the mechanism by which the DoD does what you're suggesting. Generally speaking, the DoD has to do procurement via competitive bidding. They can't just arbitrarily exclude vendors from a bid, and playing a game of "mother may I use Anthropic?" for every potential govern…

That doesn’t sound right. Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website.

> Surely there’s a big difference between Anthropic selling the government direct access to its models, and an unrelated contractor that sells pencils to the government and happens to use Anthropic’s services to help write the code for their website.

Yes, this is the part where I acknowledge that it might be overreach in my original comment, but it's not nearly as extreme or obvious as the debate rhetoric is implying. There are various exclusion rules. This particular rule was (speculating here!) probably chosen because a) the evocative name (sigh), and b) because it allows broader exclusion, in that "supply chain risks" are something you wouldn't want allowed in at any level of procurement, for obvious reasons.

Calling canned tomatoes a supply chain risk would be pretty absurd (unless, I don't know...they were found to be farmed by North Korea or something), but I can certainly see an argument for software, and in particular, generative AI products. I bet some people here would be celebrating if Microsoft were labeled a supply chain risk due to a long history of bugs, for example.

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#235
post #209

I'd prefer to see board (or executive) level signatories over lay employees -- the people who can enforce enterprise policy rather than just voice their opinions -- but this is encouraging to see nonetheless. I can't help but notice that Grok/X is not part of this initiative, though. I realize that frontier models are really coming from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, but it feels like someone is going to give in to t…

Is it really incredible? Only if you're naive. I guess most here are. Governments are paranoid, particularly about losing control and influence over its subjects. This is expected behaviour.

By that logic we should expect all governments to regress to totalitarianism, which hasn’t happened, and isn’t what’s happening here.

The question isn’t if some would attempt these behaviors, but rather if we and our democratic structures empower those people or fail to constrain them.

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#236
post #16

"We hope our leaders will..." I realize things are moving quickly, and the stakes are high here, but thinking about what happens if the hopes are not met might be a next step.

If they're truly principled, and these are true red lines, given no other recourse, I would be impressed if Anthropic decided to shut down the company. Won't happen, but I would be smashing that F key if they did.

The other two definitely never would in a million years.

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#237
post #109

My take is that none of the AI companies really care (companies can't care), they just realize that if they go down that road, public opinion will be so vehemently against AI in all forms that it will be regulated out of viability by the electorate. Also, if AI exists, AI will be used for war. The AI company employees are kidding themselves if they think otherwise, and yet they are still building it (as opposed to re…

Anthropic does not object to its use for war. In fact Anthropic explicitly allows its semi-autonomous use in war, e.g. for identifying targets. They just won't permit its use for full autonomous war, yet, because they don't believe it's safe enough.

I'm sure China doesn't care it's not safe... and there's the issue

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#238
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the US can’t realistically stop our well-funded homegrown AI Hardware startups from manufacturing with TSMC See what happened to Russian Baikal production on TSMC

You mean because of the international sanctions that needed Taiwanese, British and Dutch support to be effective? Or because of the revoked processor design licenses from the British company Arm (which is still UK headquartered… despite being NASDAQ listed and largely owned by Japanese firm SoftBank)? Or perhaps you think the US could stop us using the 12nm fabs being built by TSMC on European soil? Or could stop us…

> Or perhaps you think the US could stop us using the 12nm fabs being built by TSMC on European soil?

Being built as in not operating yet?

12 nm gpu is what? Nvidia 1080/2060 level? Those top researchers mentioned would love to train on that. Also how many gpus would be made annually?

Also what about CPU? You gonna use risc-v? With what toolchain?

Chinese could pull it off in a few years, yeah.

EU? Nah. Started thinking about sovereignty too late compared to China

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#239

The USA showed itself to be a Command Economy that uses 'private enterprise' as a fascade of legitimacy during Covid. Without government spending, employment, and contracts, the USA would be net negative growth. Now the DoD, who are by far the largest budgetary expense for the tax payer, wants us to believe they don't have a better Ai than current industry? That is a double sword admission; either they are exposing t…

> who are by far the largest budgetary expense for the tax payer

not even top 3

Re: We Will Not Be Divided

#240
This is a nice gesture but completely meaningless. There is absolutely no commitment in this. "We hope our leaders.." has no conditions, no effects.

If you're an employee and actually believe in this you need to commit to something, like resigning.

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