Comment by sudosteph
18 hours ago
> Sophisticated AIs are a genuinely new kind of entity...
Interesting that they've opted to double down on the term "entity" in at least a few places here.
I guess that's an usefully vague term, but definitely seems intentionally selected vs "assistant" or "model'. Likely meant to be neutral, but it does imply (or at least leave room for) a degree of agency/cohesiveness/individuation that the other terms lacked.
The "assistant" is a personality that the "entity" (or model) knows how to perform as, it's strictly a subset.
The best article on this topic is probably "the void". It's long, but it's worth reading: https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/785766737747574784/th...
I second the reading rec.
There are many pragmatic reasons to do what Anthropic does, but the whole "soul data" approach is exactly what you do if you treat "the void" as your pocket bible. That does not seem incidental.