Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude's new constitution

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 743 posts

Re: Claude's new constitution

#711

Post by benreesman »

inimino wrote: post #621
benreesman wrote: post #383

Anthropic might be the first gigantic company to destroy itself by bootstrapping a capability race it definitionally cannot win. They've been leading in AI coding outcomes (not exactly the Olympics) via being first on a few things, notably a serious commitment to both high cost/high effort post train (curated code and a fucking gigaton of Scale/Surge/etc) and basically the entire non-retired elite ex-Meta engagement…

> AI sovereign in January You mean you won't need tokens anymore? Are you taking bets?

I mean I'm running TensorRT-LLM on a basket of spot vendors at NVFP4 with auction convexity math and Clickhouse Keeper and custom passthrough.

I need more tokens not less because the available weight models aren't quite as strong, but I roofline sm_100 and sm_120 for a living: I get a factor of 2 on the spot arb, a factor of 2 on the utilization, and a factor of 4-16 on the quant.

I come out ahead.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#712

Post by croon »

JoblessWonder wrote: post #665
croon wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't subscribe to universal "moral absolutes" either, I think this doesn't counter the argument. I don't think even the people you describe would claim their own acts as moral.

But if only one person feels that way, wouldn't it no longer be universal? I genuinely believe there has to be one person out there who would think it is moral. (I'm just BSing on the internet... I took a few philosophy classes so if I'm off base or you don't want to engage in a pointless philosophical debate on HN I apologize in advance.)

There will always be individual differences, whether they be obstinate or altered brain chemistry, so I'd probably argue that as long as it's universal across cultures, any individual within one culture believing/claiming to believe different wouldn't change that. (But I'm just a hobby philosopher as well)

Re: Claude's new constitution

#713

Post by brazzy »

Amezarak wrote: post #634
withinboredom wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to ask, you didn't even look very hard. I'm not a historian and I learned about this stuff in World History class. Hell, there's even movies about it (unless you think there just happened to not be any children in all those villages they burned down in the movies?)...

There’s revisionist claims that all the primary sources, even those corroborated by people of the cultures in question, are either just invented propaganda or actually just isolated instances because actually, everyone throughout all time and space is on board with 2025 Western social norms. I think that’s what he’s alluding to. It’s not a very fruitful path of discussion. Archeological confirmations and independent…

It's not revisionist to point outthat a LOT of ancient texts, especially those describing particularly horrifying actions, were propaganda written by the enemies of the cultures in question - or embellishments written hundreds of years later.

I'm not saying that "torture for sport" of children never existed, just that any account should be treated with skepticism, and that it was far rarer than you would think if you just take every text at face value, especially since it's the kind of thing that gets repeated (and embellished for shock value) far more than other historical accounts.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#714

Post by brigandish »

true_religion wrote: post #431
brigandish wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case the point wouldn't be their truth (necessarily) but that they are a fixed position, making convenience unavailable as a factor in actions and decisions, especially for the humans at Anthropic. Like a real constitution, it should be claim to be inviolable and absolute, and difficult to change. Whether it is true or useful is for philosophers (professional, if that is a thing, and of the armchair variety)…

Isn’t this claim just an artifact of the US constitution? I would like to see if counties with vastly different histories have similar wording in their constitutions.

I'm not American and wasn't commenting regarding that in anyway.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#715

Post by withinboredom »

brazzy wrote: post #713
Amezarak wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s revisionist claims that all the primary sources, even those corroborated by people of the cultures in question, are either just invented propaganda or actually just isolated instances because actually, everyone throughout all time and space is on board with 2025 Western social norms. I think that’s what he’s alluding to. It’s not a very fruitful path of discussion. Archeological confirmations and independent…

It's not revisionist to point outthat a LOT of ancient texts, especially those describing particularly horrifying actions, were propaganda written by the enemies of the cultures in question - or embellishments written hundreds of years later. I'm not saying that "torture for sport" of children never existed, just that any account should be treated with skepticism, and that it was far rarer than you would think if you…

Right... The historical texts were propaganda for the few people who could read and write ... for what, exactly? I assume you think genocides in modern times are just propaganda too?

Re: Claude's new constitution

#716

Post by haritha-j »

ACCount37 wrote: post #682
haritha-j wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic I cannot rule out the cosciousness of my water bottle either.

True. You can't. And if the "consciousness is a property of matter" theory holds, then it might be conscious, to a degree. Maybe not a very interesting consciousness though.

Yeah, I always did thing that was a interesting (albiet wacky) theory. It's definitely a mysterious topic. Especially the idea that subsections of my body may also have a consciousness.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#717

Post by Amezarak »

brazzy wrote: post #713
Amezarak wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s revisionist claims that all the primary sources, even those corroborated by people of the cultures in question, are either just invented propaganda or actually just isolated instances because actually, everyone throughout all time and space is on board with 2025 Western social norms. I think that’s what he’s alluding to. It’s not a very fruitful path of discussion. Archeological confirmations and independent…

It's not revisionist to point outthat a LOT of ancient texts, especially those describing particularly horrifying actions, were propaganda written by the enemies of the cultures in question - or embellishments written hundreds of years later. I'm not saying that "torture for sport" of children never existed, just that any account should be treated with skepticism, and that it was far rarer than you would think if you…

Uh-huh. Here's the problem. Here's the way this almost always works: "Author X would have been BIASED because he belonged to Culture X that fought these people - so this is all fictional propaganda!"

Nearly all the time this is the entirety of the evidence. That is, there is no actual evidence, just people churning out papers because we live in a publish-or-perish world that well, maybe he would have been hypothetically motivated to lie or embellish. So therefore, he totally did. It's all fake!

The most notorious examples of this sort of pointlessness are claims that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians did not practice human sacrifice and it was all made up by Roman propaganda, nevermind the third-party information we have and now the archeological evidence. Rarely, in ancient examples, are they exhibiting much outrage over it.

Same for the Aztecs, another frequent target - we have non-Spanish evidence, and we never had any reason to doubt them in the first place. Part of the problem is exactly that YOU think it is particularly horrifying when most of the time (as in the Roman example) the cultural tenor was probably something much closer to the US abortion or gun control debate, or at least from peoples who saw this happening regularly enough they were substantially number to it than you or me.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#718

Post by ben_w »

adangert wrote: post #710
ben_w wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While true, irrelevant. This isn't Anthropic PBC 's constitution, it's Claude 's constitution. The models themselves, not the company, for the purpose of training the models' behaviours and aligning them with the behaviours that the company wants the models to demonstrate and to avoid.

Conway's law seems apt here. The behavior of Claude will mirror the behavior and structure of anthropic. If anthropic deems one revenue source higher than another, Claude's behavior will optimize towards that regardless of what was published here. What a company or employee "wants" and how a company is funded are usually diametrically opposed, the latter always taking precedence. Don't be evil!

Yes, but that is a different level of issue. To analogise in two different ways, first it's like, sure, Microsoft can be ordered by the US government to spy on people and to backdoor crypto. Absolutely, 100%, and most world governments are probably now asking themselves what to do about that. But what you said was kinda like someone saying of Microsoft:

  In the long run autocratic governments spying on their citizens will backdoor all crypto (Microsoft will probably concede to such an order in no time flat), which is conveniently left out in this "unit test". Mostly a waste of effort on their part.
Or if that doesn't suit you: yes, sure, there's a large flashing sign on the motorway warning of an accident 50 miles ahead of you, and if you do nothing this will absolutely cause you problems, but that doesn't make the lane markings you're currently following a "waste of effort".

Also, as published work, they're showing everyone else, including open weights providers, things which may benefit us with those models.

Unfortunately, I say "may" rather than "will", because if you put in a different constitution you could almost certainly get a model that has the AI equivalent of a "moral compass" tuned to supports anything from anarchy to totalitarianism, from mafia to self-policing, and similarly for all the other axes people care about. With a separate version of the totalitarianism/mafia/etc variants for each specific group that wants to seek power, c.f. how Grok was saying Musk is best at everything no matter how non-sensical the comparison was.

But that's also a different question. The original alignment problem is "at all", which we seem to be making progress with; once we've properly solved "at all" then we have the ability to experience the problem of "aligned with whom?"

Re: Claude's new constitution

#719

Post by brazzy »

withinboredom wrote: post #715
brazzy wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not revisionist to point outthat a LOT of ancient texts, especially those describing particularly horrifying actions, were propaganda written by the enemies of the cultures in question - or embellishments written hundreds of years later. I'm not saying that "torture for sport" of children never existed, just that any account should be treated with skepticism, and that it was far rarer than you would think if you…

Right... The historical texts were propaganda for the few people who could read and write ... for what, exactly? I assume you think genocides in modern times are just propaganda too?

The few people who could read and write were the educated ones - mostly those in power or close to them. So exactly the people you needed to influence to get something done. And of course written texts could be read aloud to those who cannot write.

What exactly are you actually trying to say? That propaganda didn't exist back then? That it was never written down?

What do you think "Carthago delenda est" was?

> I assume you think genocides in modern times are just propaganda too?

And why would you assume that?

There is in fact a modern time example for exactly the kind of thing we're talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

Re: Claude's new constitution

#720

Post by brazzy »

Amezarak wrote: post #717
brazzy wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not revisionist to point outthat a LOT of ancient texts, especially those describing particularly horrifying actions, were propaganda written by the enemies of the cultures in question - or embellishments written hundreds of years later. I'm not saying that "torture for sport" of children never existed, just that any account should be treated with skepticism, and that it was far rarer than you would think if you…

Uh-huh. Here's the problem. Here's the way this almost always works: "Author X would have been BIASED because he belonged to Culture X that fought these people - so this is all fictional propaganda!" Nearly all the time this is the entirety of the evidence. That is, there is no actual evidence, just people churning out papers because we live in a publish-or-perish world that well, maybe he would have been hypothetica…

You are making pretty bold and sweeping statements.

Do you have a specific example for such a paper that has "no actual evidence", in an actual scientific magazine?

Considering author bias is absolute standard baseline practice in historical research, and OF COURSE it is only a starting point for a comparison with alternative sources.

> Part of the problem is exactly that YOU think it is particularly horrifying when most of the time (as in the Roman example) the cultural tenor was probably something much closer to the US abortion or gun control debate, or at least from peoples who saw this happening regularly enough they were substantially number to it than you or me.

Tertullian, Apologeticum, Chapter 9:

"Babes were sacrificed publicly to Saturn in Africa till the proconsulate of Tiberius, who exposed the same priests on the same trees that overshadow the crimes of their temple, on dedicated crosses, as is attested by the soldiery of my father, which performed that very service for that proconsul. But even now this accursed crime is in secret kept up."

Does that sould "numb" to you?

Post reply on HN