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Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

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Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#621

Post by sneilan1 »

honeycrispy wrote: post #587
sneilan1 wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, this is probably the piece I am not realizing. However, there is no better approach to getting more capital than by scaring people?

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#622

Post by reasonableklout »

tabbott wrote: post #583

I feel like the articles on this have been very negative ... but aren't the Anthropic promises on safety following this change still considerably stronger than those made by the competing AI labs?

Yes, and it is easy to look at the reality of the market and see how this is needed to remain competitive

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#623

Post by keeda »

honeycrispy wrote: post #591
keeda wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

It's not well established at all. In fact, there is increasing evidence to the contrary if you look outside the HN echo chamber.

The nuanced take is that AI in coding is an amplifier of your engineering culture: teams with strong software discipline (code reviews, tests, docs, CI/CD, etc.) enjoy more velocity and fewer outages, teams with weak discipline suffer more outages. There are at least two large-scale industry reports showing this trend -- DORA 2025 and the latest DX report -- not to mention the infinite anecdotes on this very forum.

> He's trying to scare the market into his pocket.

People say this, but I don't get it. Is portraying yourself as a destroyer of the economy considered good marketing? Maybe there was a case to be made for convincing the government to impose regulations on the industry, but as we're seeing and they're experiencing first hand, the problem is the government.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#624

Post by mathgradthrow »

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…

never let philosophers do math

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#625

Post by reasonableklout »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #319
baal80spam wrote: post #318

Of course they do. You would have to be delusional to think that they won't, at some point.

What's "entertaining" is more the speed at which it's happening. It took Google probably 15 years to fully evil-ize. Anthropic ... two? There is no "ethical capitalism" big tech company possible, esp once VC is involved, and especially with the current geopolitical circumstances.

How did they evil-ize? The new Responsible Scaling Policy is still the most transparent out of all the labs. And there are the separate principles they’ve stipulated for the Pentagon, under which they’re facing threat of nationalization or being declared a supply chain risk

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#626

Post by unholiness »

nickserv wrote: post #186
isodev wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, Anthropic can’t afford to be the ones that impose any kind of sense in the market - that’s supposed to be the job of the government by creating policy, regulations and installing watchdogs to monitor things. But lucky for the AI companies, most of them are based in place that only has a government on paper and everyone forgot where that paper is.

The government is why they are dropping their pledge. https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-hegseth-ai-pentagon-mil...

No, their Responsible Scaling Policy and their government contract are not related. The RSP governs how Anthropic itself behaves w/r/t developing, testing, and releasing new models. The contract was signed with stipulations around how the government can use existing models (No mass surveillance, no military targeting without a human in the loop) which Hegseth wants removed in a standoff that hasn't yet resolved.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#627

Post by thih9 »

vharish wrote: post #405
drzaiusx11 wrote: post #325

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...

Like Google's old motto, 'Do no evil!' :D

> 'Do no evil!'

“Don’t be evil”. But yes, this behavior made me think about Google too. Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#628

Post by cmrdporcupine »

austinjp wrote: post #576
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 always feel this argument misses a point. SkyNet may still be a long way off, but autonomous killer drones are here. That is a bad situation my dudes. Every step on the journey towards SkyNet is worse than the preceding step. Let's not split hairs about which step we're on: it's getting worse, and we should stop that.

My point is that Anthropic are bullshit as "safety" and "gatekeeper" personalities because they're warning us of exactly the wrong things.

They'll ink deals with all sorts of nefarious parties and be involved in all sorts of dubious things while trumpeting their fake non-profit status and wringing their hands about imminent AGI and "alignment" of the created AIs.

The concern I have is not the alignment of the AIs. They're not capable of having one, no matter what role playing window dressing they put on it.

It's the alignment of Anthropic and the people who use their tools that is a concern. So far it seems f*cked.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#629

Post by cael450 »

inigyou wrote: post #579
cael450 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans can destroy humanity with the word prediction machine, though.

Sure bud

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#630

Post by cael450 »

jama211 wrote: post #590
cael450 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can deny that. The ability to find more vulnerabilities won't affect the majority of cybercrime. LLMs have been around for a while now and there hasn't been a noticeable significant impact yet.

And "more cybercrime" is a far, far cry from the sky-is-falling doomerism I was responding to.

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