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I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

dwarkesh.com

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Re: I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

#71

Post by api »

varenc wrote: post #24
epgui wrote: post #7

I really hate how people think LLMs == AI. An LLM can’t/shouldn’t be doing anything other than generating text.

LLMs are AI. Markov text generators from the 1970s/80s are AI. Face recognition software like FaceID is AI. Many people behind LLMs got degrees under departments that have AI in their title. AI is just computers doing things we typically associate with human intelligence, and having a conversation with a computer that effectively passes the Turing test, is definitely AI. If LLMs aren't AI, then AI isn't a useful term…

This is called the AI effect: we stop calling it AI when it works. Its goal post moving to keep the sci-fi term sci-fi.

There’s a similar thing with transhumanist “enhancement” or “life extension” stuff. When it actually works we call it medicine. Statistically one of the most powerful life extension techs ever developed was the cardiac bypass, which would have been sci-fi in 1900.

I’ve been using stuff like Claude Code and personally feel comfortable calling this stuff AI. Is it AGI? I don’t think so, but then again I’m not totally sure what that is. Am I AGI? I’m not universally able to handle all forms of cognition well and I can’t self modify much, so I’m not sure either. I’m not even sure if AGI is a well formed concept.

Intelligence is a pretty broad concept too. My pet rabbit is intelligent. Plants are intelligent. Bacteria are intelligent. Anything that can run an OODA loop, learn, adapt, and move toward a goal function is intelligent. By that definition some computer systems have been AI for decades. They’re just getting better.

I think there’s intelligence all around us. We just don’t get the wow factor from it unless it talks.

Re: I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

#72

Post by JumpCrisscross »

pydry wrote: post #69
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> real lie here is that there's an ethical superpower It’s a lie in the way cats are round is a lie—actually a lie, but one nobody brought up. I don’t think Dwarkesh is arguing for global American hegemony. Just that if AI becomes dominant, having AIs embedded with American cultural values, broadly, is probably better than having ones seeded with Xi Jinping thought. > China and the US can both be bad, and they're bot…

>AIs embedded with American cultural values, broadly, is probably better than having ones seeded with Xi Jinping thought. I'd really rather have a choice of both rather than be forced to accept "AI that downplays a 2 year old genocide" over "AI that covers up a 40 year massacre".

> rather have a choice of both

You do. So do I. If American AI goes by the wayside, we cease to have that choice anymore.

Re: I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

#73

Post by alecco »

cushychicken wrote: post #63
Readerium wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes he is room-mates with.

Love the interviews Dwarkesh sponsored with Sarah Paine from the Naval War College. Also, somewhat spitefully, find it funny that he has multiple roommates.

Those ones were a bit on the nose, no?

Re: I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

#74

Post by albelfio »

M00nF1sh wrote: post #61
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> go off about how we're such a better country that believes in freedom and goodness Better than China as a global model? Still, yes, probably. Potentially. Depends on how the next few years ago. Even if America fails, I’d argue a global republic is a brighter potential future than a global dictatorship.

Is Trump really not a dictator? Meanwhile, China has been focusing on domestic development and investing in underdeveloped regions, including across Africa. China hasn't bombed girls' schools and then lied that it's their own country thrown the bomb.

What the governments have done is different from what the cultural values of the two countries are. Chinese values and American values are different, and people can argue for one or the other. We, westerner, want our values to prevail. Dwarkesh wants to preserve our values of freedom.

Re: I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

#75

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ang_cire wrote: post #65
margalabargala wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add to that all the military posturing over Taiwan and it's clear that it's not "China doesn't do what the US does", it's "China hasn't done it...yet." The idea that anyone would be better off with China supplanting the US is asinine. This is the same government that committed the Tiananmen square massacre and still doesn't acknowledge that anything happened.

I don't see anyone arguing that we'd be better off with China, but I am arguing that neither the US or China can be trusted with this, so the author positing "US AI dominance good to keep China at bay" is bad.

> the author positing "US AI dominance good to keep China at bay" is bad

My read is they’re saying we need an alternative to Chinese AI. Because with its industrial might, the default future is Chinese technological dominance.

Re: I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

#76

Post by BoredPositron »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #62
BoredPositron wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A republic without the rule of law is not a republic anymore.

> republic without the rule of law is not a republic anymore An observation one can make when comparing a republic with the rule of law to one that ain’t, whether across time or geography. There is a real benefit to having the American experiment prominent and continuing.

Is there actually a benefit? Or are we just watching the slow motion collapse of another empire convinced of its own immortality? History is a graveyard of experiments that thought they were the exception to the rule.

Re: I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

#77

Post by lovich »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #59
margalabargala wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add to that all the military posturing over Taiwan and it's clear that it's not "China doesn't do what the US does", it's "China hasn't done it...yet." The idea that anyone would be better off with China supplanting the US is asinine. This is the same government that committed the Tiananmen square massacre and still doesn't acknowledge that anything happened.

> it's "China hasn't done it...yet.” China invaded and annexed Tibet in 1959. To the degree we had a classical definition of intent-based genocide, Beijing continues to commit it in Tibet and Xinjiang. America’s conscious is stained. But it’s downright nonsense to go off about surveillance when the comparison is China.

I’m surveilled across pretty much every aspect of my life between basic Snowden level scooping of my data and public tracking like flock cameras. Democracy is increasingly becoming a joke as the richest in our society explicitly are trying to break it and we look more and more like mid 90s Russia.

I want the US to win because I live in the US and it will probably benefit me, but we’ve largely stopped pretending to value the republic so I don’t think we can claim a moral standing on these topics anymore.

To reference your other comment, the common American man has as much de facto ability to sue our government and/or leaders as the common Chinese man

Re: I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

#78

Post by recursive »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #64
M00nF1sh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Trump really not a dictator? Meanwhile, China has been focusing on domestic development and investing in underdeveloped regions, including across Africa. China hasn't bombed girls' schools and then lied that it's their own country thrown the bomb.

> Is Trump really not a dictator? No. There is no court in Beijing that can tell Xi to knock it off. > China hasn't bombed girls' schools Read up on the treatment of Uyghur girls in the Chinese schools. It’s Indian Removal Act stuff, except right now. Again, nobody is arguing America is a beacon of anything right now. But between America and China, one is an explicit and proud autocracy.

What's the difference between a court whose orders you can ignore and a court that doesn't exist? Sounds like a question for the philosophers.

Re: I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

#79

Post by keybored »

> [99% AI soon]...

> Our future civilization will run on AI labor. And as much as the government’s actions here piss me off, in a way I’m glad this episode happened - because it gives us the opportunity to think through some extremely important questions about who this future workforce will be accountable and aligned to, and who gets to determine that.

I stopped reading there because this is a pointless exercise.[1]

This isn’t a roundtable. You are not even at the table. There isn’t some “thankfully time to discuss this...”—you are just out.

The Machine doesn’t need your labor? You are out. No norms. No discussions.

You either try to forcefully take control of the situation or you see yourself get discarded.

(I am here just assuming all the AI Maximalist (doom maximalist in this context, Trump and all) premises for the sake of the argument.)

[1] I did read the last paragraphs and the tenor is the same. “We must make laws and norms through our political system”… just like with nuclear bombs, of all things.

Re: I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

#80

Post by applfanboysbgon »

conradev wrote: post #60
ang_cire wrote: post #43

The author is naive. > The whole background of this AI conversation is that we’re in a race with China, and we have to win. But what is the reason we want America to win the AI race? It’s because we want to make sure free open societies can defend themselves. We don’t want the winner of the AI race to be a government which operates on the principle that there is no such thing as a truly private company or a private c…

I love that you are allowed to go off about how we are a worse country without fear of jail or shunning or anything like that. You are using your rights properly!

You are assuming that they are American and that the account is tied to their real identity and that they are not willing to take risks to state the truth. The Trump administration is already attempting to persecute critics[1], including some for random comments posted online[2]. If "freedom of speech" is your metric for what makes you a better country, you are in fact literally proving their point.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/02/13/...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...

People have also been detained with intention to be deported for their views about Palestine, with online comments being part of how they're chosen for targeting:

[3] https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2026/01/28/federal-go...

There was also someone jailed for a month for quoting Trump's own words about a school shooting, "we have to get over it", in the context of Charlie Kirk's death, along with many other noted instances of retaliation against online comments around that incident:

[4] https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/17/politics/retired-cop-jailed-o...

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