I feel that more people would understand Anthropic's worldview if they read more of the public source material. Sure it is a cult, but it they have been relatively transparent with their views: https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace#basic...
I have no inside info on this, but I believe that Anthropic's trouble with the feds really started when they delivered a presentation on EA and Constitutional AI and someone's takeaway was "this is very strange and probably 'woke'"
I've read some of it. It's a cult. The net effect of their recommendations is to mandate a monopoly on AI, which oh so happens to be them and their friends. That's what most cults' ideologies boil down to: reasons to give more power to the cult.
Oh, of course they have good intentions. They want everyone to benefit and everyone will be equal. They'll just be a little more equal than everyone else, of course, and because they are so virtuous they will of course have more power, which they would never misuse... they're too smart and enlightened for that, so they don't need safeguards... they only need safeguards for everyone else because everyone else is obviously less enlightened...
All cults, political movements, religions, and ideologies are always like this. It boils down to more power for the leaders. If it sounds altruistic and enlightened, be extra afraid.
All cults are for-profit in some sense. Sometimes it's not money though. Sometimes it's getting the leader(s) laid or getting them their "narcissistic supply."
I've heard tons of rumors about a get-laid angle to the Rationalist(tm) cult, but I have no first hand knowledge. Wouldn't surprise me much.
Movements and capital-I Ideologies are not your friend. They're basically all grifts. If they don't start out that way, that's what they turn into.
Jesus, being logged out on Twitter is a comically bad experience at this point. Can't view replies past the first one, click into anything, and now there's a big animated emoji pointing at a button? Miserable site, truly.
I don't know how much of current anthropic behaviour is because of the upcoming IPO but totally agree with the post: anthropic is uniquely dangerous.
But I also doubt about OAI or other big players, maybe they don't have such strong delusions of grandeur, or they're simply smarter about not showing it to everyone.
Never before has a business sector need so desperately to be federally regulated. Their financial rigor falls somewhere between suspiciously lacking and outright fraud. The claims they make about the abilities of the software, whether real or imagined, argue for regulating it like a weapons exporter.
They don't desperately need to be regulated, as such. They need to be regulated in such a way that there is a very expensive and biased certification process, which is conducted by companies that are certified to do the certifying and those companies are shell corporations owned by Anthropic and other big AI.
The actual safety rules, whatever they are, if they are put into law have to be made explicit, and that makes them easy targets to hit. But if what matter is not technical compliance, but paperwork certifying compliance, that's a different story.
I don't think Federal (US) regulation under current conditions is going to get you what you want here in terms of outcomes.
Regulated AI right now is a grift game. Donations for policy changes, and the ability to lock out competitors. Flattery to stay green-lit instead of shut down by random executive orders and policies. Bend the knee to keep shipping.
If anything, we need LESS federal regulation here and more FTC / SEC enforcement but (see above grift comments) that will also not happen in the United States until voters elect somebody that actually respects the law enough to enforce it for something other than their own gain (outside of their need to be elected, of course...)
Right. Steal the world's information and wrap it up as a set of numbers. Convince a bunch of billionaires that those numbers are worth a trillion. Then once you realize it's just another commodity and the competition is real, aim for "too big to fail", cozy up with the gov't and hope for a bailout.
There are some all-timer not X but Ys in this tweet.
"A pair of 3090s, a Mac Studio, a DGX Spark, an on-prem rack, a cluster of rented H100s, or a fleet of consumer GPUs is not just hardware. It is a vote against subscription feudalism."
Personal opinion: We are at a point where we cannot dismiss an argument because it was written using LLM and the longer message contains tropes. Observations of LLM-written content and communicating it is fine, but dismissing the argument seems irresponsible.
We also need to stop immediately dismissing certain writing tropes as being automatically LLM generated.
I'm re-reading an older fantasy series, and the amount of em-dashes in the text and similar tropes (you know, normal good writing) would easily be called out as "AI Slop" on this very forum, even though it was written in the early 90s.
https://xcancel.com/TheAhmadOsman/status/2065307070044234186
Related site mentioned:
Open source AI must win
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511908
Oh, of course they have good intentions. They want everyone to benefit and everyone will be equal. They'll just be a little more equal than everyone else, of course, and because they are so virtuous they will of course have more power, which they would never misuse... they're too smart and enlightened for that, so they don't need safeguards... they only need safeguards for everyone else because everyone else is obviously less enlightened...
All cults, political movements, religions, and ideologies are always like this. It boils down to more power for the leaders. If it sounds altruistic and enlightened, be extra afraid.
I've heard tons of rumors about a get-laid angle to the Rationalist(tm) cult, but I have no first hand knowledge. Wouldn't surprise me much.
Movements and capital-I Ideologies are not your friend. They're basically all grifts. If they don't start out that way, that's what they turn into.
Uh, just log in then?
But I also doubt about OAI or other big players, maybe they don't have such strong delusions of grandeur, or they're simply smarter about not showing it to everyone.
The actual safety rules, whatever they are, if they are put into law have to be made explicit, and that makes them easy targets to hit. But if what matter is not technical compliance, but paperwork certifying compliance, that's a different story.
Regulated AI right now is a grift game. Donations for policy changes, and the ability to lock out competitors. Flattery to stay green-lit instead of shut down by random executive orders and policies. Bend the knee to keep shipping.
If anything, we need LESS federal regulation here and more FTC / SEC enforcement but (see above grift comments) that will also not happen in the United States until voters elect somebody that actually respects the law enough to enforce it for something other than their own gain (outside of their need to be elected, of course...)
as;dr (AI slop, didn't read)
"A pair of 3090s, a Mac Studio, a DGX Spark, an on-prem rack, a cluster of rented H100s, or a fleet of consumer GPUs is not just hardware. It is a vote against subscription feudalism."
I'm re-reading an older fantasy series, and the amount of em-dashes in the text and similar tropes (you know, normal good writing) would easily be called out as "AI Slop" on this very forum, even though it was written in the early 90s.