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Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

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Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#541

Post by coldtea »

shafyy wrote: post #440
jkestner wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the CEO’s fault - they had to take all that money to keep their org a non-profit. B corps are like recycling programs, a nice logo.

Are you saying that recycling is a scam?

Aside from a few select product categories, recycling IS a scam.

E.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/17/plastic-...

Recycling mostly means "sent to landfills in the third world":

https://earth.org/waste-colonialism-a-brief-history-of-dumpi...

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/03/rich-countri...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/opinion/trash-recycling-g...

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#542

Post by jobs_throwaway »

slibhb wrote: post #500
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's no stopping it at this point" - Sure there is, if a handful of enormous datacenters pull the very large plugs (or if their shaky finances collapse), the dubiously intelligent machines will be turned off. They're not ultraintelligent yet. Stopping it merely requires convincing a relatively small number of people to act morally rather than greedily. Maybe you think that's impossible because those particular pe…

Do you really think AI companies/researchers are motivated by greed? It doesn't seem that way to me at all . Stopping AI would be immoral; it has the potential to supercharge technology and productivity, which would massively benefit humanity. Yes there are risks, which have to be managed.

AI researchers are not a monolith. I definitely think that many of them are motivated by greed. Many are also true believers that AI will improve the human condition.

I fall in the latter camp, but I think its a bit naive to claim that there is not a sizable contingent who are in AI solely to become rich and powerful.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#543

Post by moogly »

shubhamjain wrote: post #352

I was wondering if it was because of heavy-handedness of the administration, but apparently: > The policy change is separate and unrelated to Anthropic’s discussions with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with the matter. Their core argument is that if we have guardrails that others don't, they would be left behind in controlling the technology, and they are the "responsible ones." I honestly can't compreh…

"Those other companies are totally going to build the Torment Nexus, so we have no choice but to also build the Torment Nexus."

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#544

Post by coldtea »

abigail95 wrote: post #377
coldtea wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general public benefit corporations and non-profits should have a very modest salary cap for everybody involved and specific public-benefit legally binding mission statements. Anybody involved should also be prohibited from starting a private company using their IP and catering to the same domain for 5-10 years after they leave. Non-profits where the CEO makes millions or billions are a joke. And if e.g. your miss…

What's the salary cap for hiring a team to build a frontier model? These kind of rules will make PBCs weaker not stronger.

>for hiring a team to build a frontier model? These kind of rules will make PBCs weaker not stronger

Weaker is fine if those working there are actually true to the mission for the mission, are not for the profit.

Same with FOSS really, e.g. I'd rather have a weaker Linux that's an actual comminity project run by volunteers, than a stronger Linux that's just corporate agendas, corporate hires with an open license on top.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#545

Post by logravia »

honeycrispy wrote: post #465

Anthropic's CEO Dario has annoyed me to no end with his "AI will take all the jobs in 6 months" doomer speeches on every podcast he graces his presence with.

It certainly is. For people who have not heard the statements, here are some quotes. I bring them up, because I think it's worthwhile to remember the bold predictions that are made now and how they will pan out in the future.

Council on Foreign Relations, 11 months ago: "In 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is essentially writing all of the code."

Axios interview, 8 months ago: "[...] AI could soon eliminate 50% of entry-level office jobs."

The Adolescence of Technology (essay), 1 month ago: "If the exponential continues—which is not certain, but now has a decade-long track record supporting it—then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything."

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#546

Post by slfnflctd »

moomoo11 wrote: post #522
honeycrispy wrote: post #465

Anthropic's CEO Dario has annoyed me to no end with his "AI will take all the jobs in 6 months" doomer speeches on every podcast he graces his presence with.

He’s an e/acc guy. That should tell you everything. And maybe the incredibly awkward behavior and demeanor.

"Y'know, like, the thing is, like, y'know, here's the thing..."

I totally feel for people with speech pathologies or anxiety that makes it harder for them to communicate verbally, but how is this guy the public face of the company and doing all these interviews by himself? With as much as is at stake, I find it baffling.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#547

Post by dylan604 »

SecretDreams wrote: post #519
observationist wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent m…

> support people and groups who are planning and modeling and preparing for the future in a legitimate way. Who is doing that right now, exactly? And how can we take their tech and turn it into the next profitable phone app?

The "legitimate way" is nothing short of weasel words. Who defines what is legitimate. The doomers that are prepping for the future by building stockpiles of food/water/weapons being stored in bunkers/shelters they have built would say this is exactly what they are doing. Yet, these people are often panned as being a little unhinged. If we're having a conversation about tech destroying humanity, then planning a way to survive without tech seems like a legitimate concept.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#548

Post by goodmythical »

Eldt wrote: post #510
visarga wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John Good's quote is pretty myopic, it assumes machines make better machines based on being "ultraintelligent" instead of learning from environment-action-outcome loop. It's the difference between "compute is all you need" and "compute+explorative feedback" is all you need. As if science and engineering comes from genius brains not from careful experiments.

Maybe ultraintelligence is having an improved environment-action-outcome loop. Maybe that's all intelligence really is

I've noticed this core philosophical difference in certain geographically associated peoples.

There is a group of people who think AI is going to ruin the world because they think they themselves (or their superiors) would ruin the world.

There is a group of people who think AI is going to save the world because they think they themselves (or their superiors) would save the world.

Kind of funny to me that the former is typically democratic (those who are supposed to decide their own futures are afraid of the future they've chosen) while the other is often "less free" and are unafraid of the future that's been chosen for them.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#549

Post by AntiDyatlov »

ACCount37 wrote: post #524
afavour wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, when you get rid of the timelines and the methods we'll use to get there, everyone agrees on everything. But at that point it means nothing. Yeah, AGI is possible (say the people who earn a salary based on that being true). Curing all known diseases is possible too. How will we do that? Oh, I don't know. But it's a thing that could possibly happen at some point. Give me some investment cash to do it. If you cla…

I could claim "nuclear weapons are possible" in year 1940 without having a concrete plan on how to get there. Just "we'd need a lot of U235 and we need to set it off", with no roadmap: no "how much uranium to get", "how to actually get it", or "how to get the reaction going". Based entirely on what advanced physics knowledge I could have had back then, without having future knowledge or access to cutting edge classif…

In the case of nuclear weapons, we had a theory that said they were possible. We don't have a theory that says AGI or ASI is possible. It's a big difference.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#550

Post by santadays »

observationist wrote: post #474
ACCount37 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because it is. AI is powerful and AI is perilous. Those two aren't mutually exclusive. Those follow directly from the same premise. If AI tech goes very well, it can be the greatest invention of all human history. If AI tech goes very poorly, it can be the end of human history.

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent m…

Intelligence seems to boil down to an approximation of reality. The only scientific output is prediction. If we want to know what happens next just wait. If we want to predict what will happen next we build a model. Models only model a subset of reality and therefore can only predict a subset of what will happen. Llms are useful because they are trained to predict human knowledge, token by token.

Intelligence has to have a fitness function, predicting best action for optimal outcome.

Unless we let AI come up with its own goal and let it bash its head against reality to achieve that goal then I’m not sure we’ll ever get to a place where we have an intelligence explosion. Even then the only goal we could give that’s general enough for it to require increasing amounts of intelligence is survival.

But there is something going on right now and I believe it’s an efficiency explosion. Where everything you want to know if right at hand and if it’s not fuguring out how to make it right at hand is getting easier and easier.

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