Comment by Fade_Dance
1 day ago
I find it, for lack of a better word, cringe inducing how these tech specialists push into these areas of ethics, often ham-fistedly, and often with an air of superiority.
Some of the AI safety initiatives are well thought out, but most somehow seem like they are caught up in some sort of power fantasy and almost attempting to actualize their own delusions about what they were doing (next gen code auto-complete in this case, to be frank).
These companies should seriously hire some in-house philosophers. They could get doctorate level talent for 1/10 to 100th of the cost of some of these AI engineers. There's actually quite a lot of legitimate work on the topics they are discussing. I'm actually not joking (speaking as someone who has spent a lot of time inside the philosophy department). I think it would be a great partnership. But unfortunately they won't be able to count on having their fantasy further inflated.
Amanda Askell is Anthropic’s philospher and this is part of that work.
I'm not quickly finding whether Kyle Fish, who's Anthropic's model welfare researcher, has a PhD, but he did very recently co-author a paper with David Chalmers and several other academics: https://eleosai.org/papers/20241104_Taking_AI_Welfare_Seriou...
"but most somehow seem like they are caught up in some sort of power fantasy and almost attempting to actualize their own delusions about what they were doing"
Maybe I'm being cynical, but I think there is a significant component of marketing behind this type of announcement. It's a sort of humble brag. You won't be credible yelling out loud that your LLM is a real thinking thing, but you can pretend to be oh so seriously worried about something that presupposes it's a real thinking thing.
Not that there aren’t intelligent people with PhDs but suggesting they are more talented than people without them is not only delusional but insulting.
That descriptor wasn't included because of some sort of intelligence hierarchy, it was included to a) color the example of how experience in the field is relatively cheap compared to the AI space, and b) masters and PhD talent will be more specialized. An undergrad will not have the toolset to tackle the cutting edge of AI ethics, not unless their employer wants to pay them to work in a room for a year getting through the recent papers first.
You answered your own question on why these companies don't want to run a philosophy department ;) It's a power struggle they could loose. Nothing to win for them.
You presume that they don't run a philosophy department, but Amanda Askell is a philosopher and leads the finetuning and AI alignment team at Anthropic.