Was hoping they’d fight this tooth and nail and not leave their values.
Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
631–640 of 716 posts
Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
#632They’re going to cave to keep the legation from destroying their business. This admin has gone full idiocracy.
Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
#633> “We felt that it wouldn't actually help anyone for us to stop training AI models,” How magnanimous! They are only thinking of others, you see. They are rejecting their safety pledge for you . > “We didn't really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments … if competitors are blazing ahead.” Oops, said the quiet part out loud that it’s all about money. “I mean, if al…
> 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…
Anthropic posits itself as a public benefit corp
Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
#634Earlier 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…
right, because turning off any number of data centers is going to do anything at all but create massive pressure on researching the efficiency and effectiveness of the models. There are already designs that do not require massive data centers (or even a particularly good smart phone) to outperform average humans in average tasks. All you'd accomplish by hobbling the data centers is slow the growth of sloppy models th…
> quick edit to add: At it's peak Folding@Home was utilizing 2.4 EXAflops worth of silicon. At that moment that one single distributed computational project had more compute than easily the top 100 data centers at the time. Let that sink in: The first exa-scale compute was achieved with smartphones, PS3s, and clunky old HP laptops; not a "hyperscaler"
A DGX B200 has a power draw of 14.3 kW and will do 72-144 petaFLOP of AI workload depending on how many bits of accuracy is asked for; this is 5-10 petaFLOP/kW: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-b200/
Data centres are now getting measured in gigawatts. Some of that's cooling and so on. I don't know the exact percent, so let's say 50% of that is compute. It doesn't matter much.
That means 1GW of DC -> 500 MW of compute -> 5e5 kW -> 5e5 * [5-10] PFLOP/s -> 2500 - 5000 exaFLOP/s.
I'm not sure how many B200s have been sold to date?
Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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%
If you mean "us" on this forum, I would believe that. I would bet the number of engineers working on stuff "outside the distribution" is overrepresented here. If you mean "us" as in all software engineers, not at all. The challenge we're facing is exactly that, reskilling the 90% of engineers who have been working on CRUD apps to the 10% that is outside the distribution.
> 90% of engineers who have been working on CRUD apps
I am a 30-year "veteran" in the industry and in my opinion this cannot be further from the truth but it is often quotes (even before AI). CRUD apps have been a solved problem for quite some time now and while there are still companies who may allow someone to "coast" doing CRUD stuff they are hard to find these days. There is almost always more to it than building dumb stuff. I have also seen (more and more each year) these types of jobs being off-shored to teams for pennies on a dollar.
What I have experienced a lot is teams where there are what I call "innovators" and "closers." "Innovators" do the hard work, figure shit out, architect, design... and then once that is done you give it to "closers" to crank things out. With LLMs now the part of "closers" could be "replaced" but in my experience there is always some part, whether it is 5% or 10% that is difficult to "automate" so-to-speak
Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 di…
If these tools were so great they wouldn't be struggling so hard to sell them. Great sign that the company has to mandate a "productivity" tool that the workers hate.
Hence why all these LLM companies love government contracts, they can't sell to consumers so they'll just steal from tax payers instead.
Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
#637Earlier 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…
Unfortunately, campaign finance reform would possibly require a constitutional amendment, or at the very least a big shift in how the supreme court views things (so, not likely in my lifetime), since the current jurisprudence is that limiting campaign donations is a violation of first amendment rights.
Right, I got into some similar details in downstream comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47155602
I don't think companies are people, but I also don't expect we'll see a Supreme Court that can overturn that nonsense any time soon.
Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
#638I 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…
I lie too.
Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> has the potential to supercharge technology and productivity, which would massively benefit humanity The opportunities you chose to list are the greedy ones. > Yes there are risks, which have to be managed. How? As a reminder, we've known about the effect of burning coal on the climate for well over a century, we knew that said climate change would be socially and economically disasterous for half a century, yet th…
> The opportunities you chose to list are the greedy ones.
Technology covers healthcare. I don't see how it's "greedy" to want to cure cancer. But on some level I guess "wanting life to be better" is greedy.
Your attitude is very European, and it's basically why your continent is being left behind. I'm not totally against Europe becoming the world's retirement home, as long as there are places in the world where people are allowed to innovate.
Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
#640Earlier 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…
I think you're falling victim to survivorship bias there, or something like it.
In 1940 I might have said "fusion power is possible" based entirely on what advanced psychics knowledge I had. And I would have been correct, according to the laws of physics it is possible. We still don't have it though. When watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon I might have said "moon colonies are possible", and I'd have been right there too. And yet...