Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

time.com

591–600 of 716 posts

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#591
post #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 act…

He's not right though. He's trying to scare the market into his pocket. It's well established that AI just turns devs into AI babysitters that are 10% more productive and produce 200% the bugs, and in the long-term don't understand what they built.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I agree, but I addressed this with "or makes them feel better about themselves". The older generations just have a more ingrained ideal of "if I sell out, I'm a bad person". So they don't because it makes them feel better about themselves - better than a large amount of money might. Subsequent generations have seen enough people sell out that the threshold is raised, and they don't believe as strongly that they're a bad person for having a price. I don't think anyone is above this dynamic.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#594
post #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 act…

> 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.

most of us are getting paid for the other 10%

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#595

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…

There are plenty of people that argue that you need nontechnological pixi dust for intelligence.

There are also people who think there might be emergent behavior at play that would require extremely high fidelity simulation to achieve.

Also, the real thing (intelligence) as it is currently in operation isn't that well understood

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#596

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…

OpenAI never open sourced anything relevant or in time. Internal email leaks they only cared to become billionaires. Claude only talks about safety, but never released anything open source. All this said I’m surprised China actually delivered so many open source alternatives. Which are decent. Why westerns (which are supposed to be the good guys) didn’t release anything open source to help humanity ? And always claim…

> Claude only talks about safety, but never released anything open source.

im still working through this issue myself but hinton said releasing weights for frontier models was "crazy" because they can be retrained to do anything. i can see the alignment of corporate interest and safety converging on that point.

from the point of view of diminishing corporate power i do think it is essential to have open weights. if not that, then the companies should be publicly owned to avoid concentration of unaccountable power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66WiF8fXL0k&t=544s

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#597
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at Anthropic last year and their entire "ethics" charade was laughable. Write essays about AI safety in the application. An entire interview round dedicated to pretending that you truly only care about AI safety and not the money. Every employee you talk to forced to pretend that the company is all about philanthropy, effective altruism and saving the world. In reality it was a mid-level manager intervi…

> Every employee you talk to forced to pretend that the company is all about philanthropy, effective altruism and saving the world I was an interviewer, and I wasn't encouraged to talk about philanthropy, effective altruism, or ethics. Maybe even slightly discouraged? My last two managers didn't even know what effective altruism was. (Which I thought was a feat to not know months into working there.) When did you int…

I do trust that you earnestly believe in the importance of ethics in AI - but at the same time, I think that may be causing you to assume that the average person cares just as much or similarly.

I've seen the same phenomenon play out in health-tech startup space. The mission is to "do good", but at the end of the day, for most leaders it's just a business and for most employees it's just a job. In fact, usually the ones who care more than that end up burning out and leaving.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#598
I personally think, and with my personal experience being harassed and abused by the CIA, that the CIA and spy agencies (call them the pentagon or the rest of the government) is responsible for this.

On the other hand, those organizations are operating in the best interest of Americans and the world right?

Surely, those agencies aren't just a trick of the rich people? Right?

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#599

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.

I understand, and in particular the point about making yourself feel better, but that's where I would expect the sticking point to be before it was for other people. There are a great many ways I could make my life easier that I stubbornly refuse to because it would decrease my opinion of myself. I guess that's where your last point creeps in -- I've never been financially incentivized enough.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#600

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…

We all made fun of Blake Lemoine and others for spending too many late nights up chatting with (ridiculously primitive by this year's standards) LLM chat bots and deciding they were sentient and trapped. But frankly I feel like the founders of Anthropic and others are victim of the same hallucination. LLMs are amazing tools. They play back & generate what we prompt them to play back, and more. Anybody who mistakes th…

I think playing with the API's is something I'd encourage people excited about these technologies to do. I think it'll lead to the "magic" wearing off but more appreciation for what they actually can accomplish.
Post reply on HN