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Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

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Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using money as a medium to facilitate exchange of goods and services is not capitalism. Abandoning one of your core principles in the pursuit of money, or more charitably because not doing so means your competitors will make more money and overtake you in the marketplace is an outgrowth of capitalism In the Soviet Union the reasons might have been "to beat the Capitalists", "for the pride of our country" or "Stalin a…

>Though a variant of the last one may well have happened here, and the justification we read is just the one less damaging to everyone involved Hegseth was planning on getting the model via the Defense Production Act or killing Anthropic via supply chain risk classification preventing any other company working with the Pentagon from working with Anthropic. So while it wasn't Siberia, it was about as close as the US c…

So this isn’t really capitalism then. Crony capitalism is closer to a planned economy then it is to a free market.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government is forcing them to change their policy, by definition that is regulation and oversight. Let's say that the government was forcing a company to change their overall right-to-repair or return policy in order to avoid being on a blacklist, would that not be seen as oversight and regulation? Whether the regulation is legitimate or of benefit is a different argument.

The government doesn't seem to be forcing them to do anything. They're saying that doing business with them is contingent upon changing the policy. So, they could simply stop doing business with the government. Hegseth could come to my house today and tell me that I need to start kicking puppies in order to do business with him, and I could just say no. No coercion happening.

If they comply, they can continue bidding on government contracts.

If they refuse, they will be put on a national security blacklist, like for Huawei's telecommunication equipment.

Seems pretty forceful to me.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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

> Riley: Hey, what's class

> Huey: It means don't act like niggas

> Grandad: S-see, that's what I'm talkin' about right there. We don't use the n-word in this house

> Huey: Grandad, you said the word "nigga" 46 times yesterday. I counted

> Grandad: Nigga, hush

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLodIw5iKX8

Funny scene, but it also illustrates a more serious point about (human) alignment - not all humans believe exactly the same things are good and bad, or consistently act in accordance with what they claim they believe is good. This is such a basic fact of human social life that it's almost banal to point it out explicitly; but if (specific) human beings or (specific) organizations of human beings are trying to align the AIs they are creating to human values, it will eventually become apparent that the notion of "human values" stops being coherent once you zoom in enough. Humans don't all share the same values, we aren't completely aligned with each other.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#285
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, the US is one of the few countries that tries to collect (Federal) income tax from all citizens regardless of the country they are currently living in. To be fair, when you can prove that income is entirely foreign (not a single US company in the chain of ownership) that income becomes almost entirely deductible and the tax reporting essentially just a census on how well US citizens are doing from an income…

Yes, many countries have significant limits on campaign donations. Even third parties are restricted from advertising on behalf of a party, and so on. So no company can simply donate large sums of money, nor can any single person. The goal is that individuals will be the largest donors, not companies, and that as everyone is capped in the same way, advertising will be a more level playing field. We don't want money i…

The US technically even has laws that that were supposed to do that still on the books. A particular problem was a very broken decision by the US Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [1] that opened too large of a barn door that the US has been reeling from ever since. That trial argued that companies were individuals/people and that money was the "free speech" of companies and shouldn't ever be curtailed. So there are so many things wrong with that court case on so many levels. It led to the rise of Super PACs (Political Action Committees), companies designed to launder money for political gain where the donors are allowed to remain anonymous and the Super PAC "speak" for them, because now it was "free speech" and not bribes and regulatory capture.

I know pessimists that believe the only way the US succeeds in the Campaign Finance Reform it needs now is through a Constitutional Amendment and if we can't count on Congress to be interested in it (due to bribery), and not enough individual States seem to care (some because they want a chunk of that pie), it's going to take a full Constitutional Convention to pass that amendment, something that hasn't successfully been done in the US since 1787 (also, the first attempt).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#286
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully believe that Dario is 100% full of shit and possibly a worse person than Altman. He loves to pontificate like he's the moral avatar of AI but he's still just selling his product as hard as he can.

They are all the same given their motivations - Demis Hassabis is the only one who, to me at least, sounds genuine on stage.

Demis is a researcher first. Others are not.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#287
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oops, said the quiet part out loud that it’s all about money. “I mean, if all of our competitors are kicking puppies in the face, it doesn’t make sense for us to not do it too. Maybe we’ll also kick kittens while we’re at it”. I mean, yes, that is actually how world works. That is why we need safety, environmental and other anti-fraud regulations. Because without them, competition makes it so that every successful…

Yes, this. It's unfortunate that anthropic dropped this and it's also exactly how the system is supposed to work. Companies don't regulate themselves, the government regulates the companies. Now, you may notice that the government is also choosing not to regulate these companies...which is another matter altogether.

> anthropic dropped this and it's also exactly how the system is supposed to work. Companies don't regulate themselves, the government regulates the companies.

In this case, it's exactly how it's NOT supposed to work because there's no government regulation concerning the issue. It would be bad looks to have regulation that mandates LESS safety thus the issue was forced on commercial grounds.

I called it yesterday, there was never any doubt in my mind how this would end, and it did in less than 24 hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47144609

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I VERY LARGELY prefer an AI like grok that doesn't pretend and let the onus of interpretation to the user rather than a bunch of anonymous "researchers" that may be equally biased, at the extreme, may tell you that America's founding father were black women Setting aside for a moment that Grok is manipulated and biased to a hilarious extent. ("Elon is world champion at everything, including drinking piss") There is…

This is a very fair answer but missing some points. I do personally believe that grok is a less biased against too many PC answers but you may disagree. "All the existing texts on the founding fathers are filled with 250 years of bias, propaganda, and agenda pushing from all sorts of authors." not sure of the point is tho ? Mine is that gemini was biaised so hard that it was generating diverse founding fathers which…

> not sure of the point is tho ? Mine is that gemini was biaised so hard that it was generating diverse founding fathers which is factually untrue.

While your first post's criticism of Gemini's nonsense is true, that is a critique often framed as "Everything was neutral until the wokerati put all this woke into our world". Hence the big response.

Taking away the hamfisted diversity doesn't fix the underlaying problems Google tried to cover by adding it.

> The fact that history has a pro-american values when written by americans is also true but it has nothing to do really with the argument: if an AI is able to see through such propaganda and provide a balanced view on it as a human would this is enough

The problem is that it doesn't "see through" anything. LLMs don't "think".

In your example, it's not reviewing historical documents about the US constitution, it's statistically approximating all the historical & political writing about the US constitution. (Of which there is a lot)

Now, the training and prompt will influence which way the LLM will lean, but without explicit instruction or steered training, it'll "average out" all the prior written evaluations of the US constitution and absorb the biases therein.

> So it's definetely seeing through any form of propaganda you desribe

I would argue the opposite (though I can only go off your snippets), it's mirroring the broad US consensus it's constitution pretty well. And this kind of "Well who's to say whether X is good or bad" response is something that LLMs have been heavily trained and system-prompted to do, many people have noted how hard it is to get a straight answer out of LLMs.

To pick out one detail: The undercurrent of 'American Exceptionalism' shows in how the Constitutional Amendments are seen as "self-correction" and the US consitution being "improvable". By European standards, the US constitution is hard to change. In many countries, a simple 2/3rds supermajority in both houses is sufficient. This also shows in the amount of changes; The Constitution of Norway is but 26 years younger than the US', yet has racked up hundreds of changes notably including a full rewrite in 2014. (Such rewrites are fairly common in the past century) By European standards, the US constitution is a calcified mess.

Now, this doesn't mean Grok is "evil" about this particular detail, it's just a small detail. It's a fine enough summary, would certainly get whatever kid uses it for homework a passing grade. But it's illustrative of how the LLM output is influenced by the prior writing and cultural views on the subject. If you're bilingual, try asking the same thing in two languages. (Or if you're not, try it anyway and stick the output into google translate to get an idea)

It's the things people generally don't think about when writing that are most likely to fly under the radar.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#290
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, many countries have significant limits on campaign donations. Even third parties are restricted from advertising on behalf of a party, and so on. So no company can simply donate large sums of money, nor can any single person. The goal is that individuals will be the largest donors, not companies, and that as everyone is capped in the same way, advertising will be a more level playing field. We don't want money i…

The US technically even has laws that that were supposed to do that still on the books. A particular problem was a very broken decision by the US Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [1] that opened too large of a barn door that the US has been reeling from ever since. That trial argued that companies were individuals/people and that money was the "free speech" of companies and shouldn't ev…

There have been some fairly longstanding judicial decisions overturned recently, although I know the reasons are not in alignment with the decision you mention, it does mean there is hope for such change.

So maybe it's actually far less work than considered. Maybe, attacking the decision with a modern eye is helpful.

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