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Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

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Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#701
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that recycling is a scam?

Aside from a few select product categories, recycling IS a scam. E.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/17/plastic-... Recycling mostly means "sent to landfills in the third world": https://earth.org/waste-colonialism-a-brief-history-of-dumpi... https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/03/rich-countri... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/opinion/trash-recycling-g...

It really depends on the type of material and country. Many monoplastics and almost all cardboard can be recycled and is (e.g. in Germany and other European countries).

> Recycling mostly means "sent to landfills in the third world"

This is less true now that China banned plastic waste imports.

I agree though that the average person might overestimate how much of their waste can be recycled. However, many materials are recycled and then re-used, so it's not like the whole concept is a scam.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#702
post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except this is not the age of the Rockefellers or the Carnegies, who, despite being far more philanthropic than modern-day billionaires, drew ire from every corner of society for their wealth accumulation. It wasn't until the New Deal that the balance shifted. Unconstrained accumulation of capital into the hands of the few without appropriate investment into labor is illiberal and incompatible with democracy and true…

> Those of us who are capitalists see surplus value as a compromise to ensure good economic growth. I think the problem is that every system of economics requires ignoring human nature in order to believe it possibly can work. In order to believe that capitalism doesn't lead to despotic rule you have to ignore the fact that civilizations love a good hierarchy far more than they love justice and fairness. You can make…

I don't really believe that the strongman theory and hierarchy is inherent to human social structure, or at least not the way in which we do it. Some level of hierarchy is inevitable, but the longest-lasting and most stable hierarchies were somewhat bureaucratic and highly meritocratic (think China and their civil service exams) and our system is extremely bureaucratic and not meritocratic whatsoever.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#703
post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cursor and Claude Code are amongst the fastest selling products in history. Cursor: 1 Billion ARR in 24 months -- https://andrew.ooo/posts/cursor-fastest-growing-saas-1b-arr/ Claude Code: 2.5 Billion ARR in 10 months -- https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-30-billion-s...

Ah yes the mythical "valuations" based on unicorn dust and pixie horns (note that they don't define what a month actually is, my hunch is they take their best week then multiply it by x52).

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's technically impossible, I'm saying that in the real world, it's not going to stop. Nobody is going to stop it. A significant number of people don't want it to stop. A minority of people are in the "stop AI" camp, and the ones with the money and power are on the other side. It's an arms race replete with tribalism and the quest for power and taps into everything primal at the root of human behavior…

The whole world decided in the 1970s not to pursue the technology of germ-line genetic engineering of humans, and that decision has stood. People similar to you were saying in the 1950s and later that it was inevitable that nuclear weapons would be used in anger in massive attacks. Although the people in charge are tentatively for AI "progress", if that ever changes, they can and will put a stop to large AI training…

I actually got to talk to an individual at a coffee shop just last night about this issue, he's a representative of our local PauseAI chapter:

https://pauseai.info/proposal

They think that a similar solution to the genetic modification treaties and nuclear proliferation treaties can be implemented for AI training.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole world decided in the 1970s not to pursue the technology of germ-line genetic engineering of humans, and that decision has stood. People similar to you were saying in the 1950s and later that it was inevitable that nuclear weapons would be used in anger in massive attacks. Although the people in charge are tentatively for AI "progress", if that ever changes, they can and will put a stop to large AI training…

I actually got to talk to an individual at a coffee shop just last night about this issue, he's a representative of our local PauseAI chapter: https://pauseai.info/proposal They think that a similar solution to the genetic modification treaties and nuclear proliferation treaties can be implemented for AI training.

That plus something similar to the prohibition on publishing knowledge about the design of nuclear weapons, but for machine-learning algorithms. (Inb4 "but that's ridiculous, you can't ban linear algebra". Watch us!)

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#706
post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, Anthropic can do no wrong, correct?

With this new announcement, Anthropic is saying they can _specifically_ "do wrong" since it's in their best interests...

Yep I agree, I forgot to add /s to my comment

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those two things are prevented by economics more than physics. For AI in particular, the economics currently favor ongoing capability R&D - and even if they didn't favor AI R&D directly (i.e. if ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion never happened), they would still favor making the computational inputs of AI R&D cheaper over time. Building advanced AIs is becoming easier and cheaper. It's just that the bar of "good enough" h…

> But the path there is getting shorter over time, clearly. Why do you assume there is no hard limit we’ll hit with the current tech that prevents us from reaching AGI?

The first reason is that LLM advancements are yet to stop. And the second reason is that "the current tech" is a moving target.

If, let's say, in 2029, it turns out that autoregressive transformer LLMs have exhausted their potential, the R&D that goes into improving them now would be put into finding alternatives. And I struggle to imagine not finding any.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#708
post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is certainly lax, but the US doesn't allow autonomous ATTACK systems. For Attack systems it is always required that a human makes the judgement call when to attack. Or least it didn't until the current regime. The US does have autonomous defensive systems. I could be wrong though, can you post your evidence? The closest I could find is loitering munitions. Even so, a company shouldn't be forced to go against it…

Drone pilots don't get any info about their target, certainly not enough to make a judgement call. If they object (or burn out) someone else is put in the chair. People are conscripted, they put on the uniform and become legitimate targets? It might as well be a robot doing the shooting. Same difference.

It's not the same.

The pilot becomes responsible for those outcomes. For example indiscriminately killing civilians for example is a war crime. Its easier to get an AI to commit war crimes than humans.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently they got coerced by the current US admin. The department of war in particular, who want to use their products for military applications. Not much room for "safety" there. Then again, the entire US is currently speedrunning an evil build.

> department of war Department of Defense is the official name, and they did have a choice: they could have stopped working with the military. But they chose money and evil.

Not sure what you mean by "official." They call themselves that way: https://www.war.gov/

It doesn't matter that there exists another name on some paper, when all official, ceremonial and public communications use this name. The old name is about as worthless as the constitution or the senate at this point. The executive branch has successfully taken over the country.

Re: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

#710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he means pedophiles can't say paedophile on YouTube so people say PDF file

But we're not on YouTube.

Op sec is a thing. Gotta avoid the internet crawlers that look for key words.
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