661–670 of 716 posts
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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?
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This guy from Effective Altruism pivoted away from helping the poor to help try to control AI from being a terminator type entity and then pivoted to being, ah, its okay for it to be a terminator type entity. > Holden Karnofsky, who co-founded the EA charity evaluator GiveWell, says that while he used to work on trying to help the poor, he switched to working on artificial intelligence because of the “stakes”: > “The…
> then pivoted to being, ah, its okay for it to be a terminator type entity. Isn’t that the opposite of what he’s saying? He’s saying it could become that powerful, and given that possibility it’s incredibly important that we do whatever we can to gain more control of that scenario
The quote was from 2022 for the first pivot to AI to prevent it from becoming a terminator style entity. The last pivot was not in the quote but is the topic of this current Hacker News post, where takes credit for dropping the safety pledge:
"That decision included scrapping the promise to not release AI models if Anthropic can’t guarantee proper risk mitigations in advance."
I expect the next pivot will be that we need to allow the US military to use Anthropic to kill people because otherwise they will use a less pure AI to kill people and our Anthropic is better at only killing the bad guys, thus it is the lesser evil.
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> then pivoted to being, ah, its okay for it to be a terminator type entity. Isn’t that the opposite of what he’s saying? He’s saying it could become that powerful, and given that possibility it’s incredibly important that we do whatever we can to gain more control of that scenario
I think the poster here has an axe to grind, considering they quoted something that directly contradicted their point and didn't even notice.
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> For all of you who thought Anthropic were “the good guys” Was anyone fooled by this? I mean, I know this is HN and there is a demographic here that gets all misty eyed about the benevolence of corporations. It takes a special kind of naivety to believe in those claims.
Plenty of people here actually bought into the do no evil, how great Apple is for the environment (with throw away soldered hardware), or whatever.
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?
Sounds like one of the white collar jobs that LLMs were supposed to solve
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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.
Have you gotten any indication that machines won't have sensors?!
There's something compelling about helping assemble the machine. Science fiction was completely wrong about motivation. It's fun.
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Why are you asking this question? You know what the answer is, you've just arbitrarily decided that it's specious in an attempt to frame rebuttals as unreasonable.
I'm open to reasonable rebuttals but all the rebuttals that I've seen so far are simply uninformed.
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> 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. Ugh, people here seem to think that all software…
The problem is, the low hanging fruit, the stuff it's good at, is 90% of all software. Maybe more. And it's getting better at the other 10% too. Two years ago ChatGPT struggled to help me with race conditions in a C++ LD_PRELOAD library. It was a side project so I dropped it. Last week Codex churned away for 10 minutes and gave me a working version with tests.
- It's garbage collected, so variable lifetimes don't need to be traced
- It's structurally typed, so LLMs can get away with duplicating types as long as the shape fits.
- The type system has an escape hatch (any or unknown)
- It produces nice stack traces
- The industry has more or less settled styling issues (ie, most typescript looks pretty uniform stylistically).
- There is an insane amount of open source code to train on
- Even "compiled" code is somewhat easy(er) to deobfuscate and read (because you're compiling JS to JS)
- Memory management is important, and tricky
- Segfaults give you hardly anything to work with
- There are like a thousand different coding styles
- Nobody can agree on the proper subset of the language to use (ie, exceptions allowed or not allowed, macros, etc.)
- Security issues are very much magnified (and they're already a huge problem in vibecoded typescript)
- The use cases are a lot more diverse. IE, if you're using typescript you're probably either writing a web page or a server (maybe a command line app). (I'm lumping electron in here, because it's still a web page and a server). C is used for operating systems, games, large hero apps, anything CPU or memory constrained, etc.
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> I can never work out if the companies are deluded and truly believe they're about to create a singularity or just claiming they are to reassure investors/convince the public of their inevitability. You can never figure out if the people selling something are lying about it's capabilities, or if they've actually invented a new form of intelligence that can rival or surpass billions of years of evolution? I'd like to…
> if they've actually invented a new form of intelligence that can rival or surpass billions of years of evolution? Human creations have surpassed billions of years of evolution at several functions. There are no rockets in nature, nor animals flying at the speed of a common airliner. Even cars, or computers or everything in the modern world. I think this is a bit like the shift from anthropocentric view of intellige…
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> 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 peop…
> Technology covers healthcare. If you'd chosen to list that in the first place, I wouldn't have said what I did; "supercharge technology and productivity" is looking at everything through the lens of money and profit, not the lens of improving the human condition. > Your attitude is very European, and it's basically why your continent is being left behind And yours is very American. You talk about managing the risks…
Bullshit. "Technology and productivity" are not the same thing as "money and profit". You're projecting your garden-variety European degrowth ideology onto what I wrote.
> Also, to be blunt, China's almost certain to win any economic or literal arms race you think you're part of; they make too much critical hardware now.
Europeans are so hilariously polarized against the US that they would prefer China, a literal authoritarian dictatorship, to "win any global economic arms race". I guess it's because China is too culturally distant for them to feel insecure over.
> AI is one of the few things that could, actually, literally, end up with the planet being physically disassembled. "All it needs" is solving the extremely hard challenges of a von Neumann replicator, and, well, solving hard problems is kinda the point of making AI in the first place.
It's not worth wringing our hands over science fiction scenarios.