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Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

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Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#581
post #490

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.

+1, he also has this viewpoint that no other lab will be able to "contain" AI and has a general doomer outlook on AI which I don't appreciate.

To be fair, it's hilarious how much verbiage was spent discussing AI 'getting out of the box', when the first thing everyone did with LLMs was immediately throw away the box and go "Here! Have the internet! Here! Have root access! Want a robot body? I'll get you a robot body."

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#582
post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is also a group of people who think AI is going to ruin the world because they don't think the AI will end up doing what its creators (or their superiors) would want it to do.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#584

Public benefit corporations in the AI space have become a farce at this point. They're just regular corporations wearing a different hat, driven by the same money dynamics as any other corp. They have no ability to balance their stated "mission" with their drive for profit. When being "evil" is profitable and not-evil is not, guess which road they'll take...

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…

You're overthinking this. Just give the beneficiaries of the corporation (which in the context of a "public" benefit corporation is the public) the grounds to sue if the company reneges on their mission, the same way shareholders can sue if a company fails to act in their interest.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#585

More and more I have just come to accept that the majority of people, at least those I am exposed to in the US, don't fundamentally believe in anything. Everyt conviction has a buyout price.

You have to understand that people only believe in things and have "morals" because it either helps them get what they want or makes them feel better about themselves. Of course such a thing has a buyout price. That's human nature. Capitalism just allows it to be on display in the worst way.

More (but not all) Americans of older generations, say the Greatest Generation, I noticed used to more frequently have integrity and hard boundaries that refused to do certain things no matter the cost. Subsequent generations I noticed, especially much wealthier individuals, overall tended to have those pieces of their character missing from them and were willing to do things like conspire on venture structures for tax evasion purposes, promote weakening of laws to favor their concerns, borderline bribe politicians, and treat employees as basically disposable nonhumans. It revolted me to the point where I left startups and the Valley. It feels like the prior generations had an appreciation of community and Kantian ethics whereas later were raised in a much-too-comfortable environment of unlimited self-esteem and hyperindividualism.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#586
post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a Pro subscriber until last week. When I was chatting with Claude, it kept asking a lot of personal questions - that seemed only very very vaguely relevant to the topic. And then it struck me - all these AI companies are doing are just building detailed user models for being either targeted for advertising or to be sold off to the highest bidder. It hasn't happened yet with Anthropic, but when the bubble money…

A less cynical explanation: It's heavily trained to ask follow-up questions at the end of a response, to drive more conversation and more engagement. That's useful both for making sure you want to renew your subscription, and also probably for generating more training data for future models. That's sufficient explanation for the behavior we're seeing.

I could be wrong, but I remember that Claude models didn't really ask follow-up questions. But since GPT models are doing that, and somehow people like that (why?), Anthropic started doing it as well.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#587

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.

I don't understand why some of these AI companies check their egos at the door and hire public relations companies. Yes, I understand they are changing the world but customers do not open their wallets when they are scared. Very few people I know are as avant-guarde as I am with AI, but, most people look at these new technologies and simply feel fear. Why pay for something that will replace you?

He knows what he's doing.

It's to drive FOMO for investors. He needs tens of billions of capital and is trying to scare them into not looking at his balance sheet before investing. It's reckless, and is soaking up capital that could have gone towards more legitimate investments.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#588

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.

I think he's right and we should be thinking about this a lot more. Even the IMF is worried about 40 - 60% of global employment: https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2024/01/14/ai-will-tra...

Focusing on Dario, his exact quote IIRC was "50% of all white collar jobs in 5 years" which is still a ways off, but to check his track record, his prediction on coding was only off by a month or so. If you revisit what he actually said, he didn't really say AI will replace 90% of all coders, as people widely report, he said it will be able to write 90% of all code.

And dhese days it's pretty accurate. 90% of all code, the "dark matter" of coding, is stuff like boilerplate and internal LoB CRUD apps and typical data-wrangling algorithms that Claude and Codex can one-shot all day long.

Actually replacing all those jobs however will take time. Not just to figure out adoption (e.g. AI coding workflows are very different from normal coding workflows and we're just figuring those out now), but to get the requisite compute. All AI capacity is already heavily constrained, and replacing that many jobs will require compute that won't exist for years and he, as someone scrounging for compute capacity, knows that very well.

But that just puts an upper limit on how long we have to figure out what to do with all those white collar professionals. We need to be thinking about it now.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#589

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…

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.

True of AGI, but what we have right now doesn't fit that bill. (I would encourage people that disagree with this to go talk to ChatGPT about how LLMs and reasoning models work. Seriously! I'm not being snarky. It's very good at explaining itself. If you understand how reasoning works and what an LLM is actually doing it's hard to believe that our current models are going to do much more than become iteratively more precise at mimicking their training datasets.)

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#590

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.

Tbh, I find this argument really stupid. The word prediction machine isn’t going to destroy humanity. Sure, humans can do some dumb stuff with it, but that’s about it. Stop mistaking science fiction for science.

You know how easy it’s become to find security vulnerabilities already with LLM support? Cyber terrorism is getting more dangerous, you can’t deny that.
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