Comment by goranmoomin
2 days ago
TBH I am sad that Anthropic is changing its stance, but in the current world, if you even care about LLM safety, I feel that this is the right choice — there’s too many model providers and they probably don’t consider safety as high priority as Anthropic. (Yes that might change, they can get pressurized by the govt, yada yada, but they literally created their own company because of AI safety, I do think they actually care for now)
If we need safety, we need Anthropic to be not too far behind (at least for now, before Anthropic possibly becomes evil), and that might mean releasing models that are safer and more steerable than others (even if, unfortunately, they are not 100% up to Anthropic’s goals)
Dogmatism, while great, has its time and place, and with a thousand bad actors in the LLM space, pragmatism wins better.
Do you work at Anthropic, or know people who do?
I genuinly curious why they are so holy to you, when to me I see just another tech company trying to make cash
Edit: Reading some of the linked articles, I can see how Anthropic CEO is refusing to allow their product for warfare (killing humans), which is probably a good thing that resonates with supporting them
Let us not pretend that they won't be used for war eventually. If they cave immediately under pressure, then this is an inevitably.
How is it a good thing to refuse to provide our warfighters with the tools that they need? I mean if we're going to have a military at all then we owe it to them to give them the best possible weapons systems that minimize friendly casualties. And let's not have any specious claims that LLMs are somehow special or uniquely dangerous: the US military has deployed operational fully autonomous weapons systems since the 1970s.
This is the US military we’re talking about so 95% of what they do is attacking people for oil. They don’t “need” more of anything, they’re funded to the tune of a trillion dollars a year, almost as much as every other military in the world combined. What holy mission do you think they’re going to carry out with the assistance of LLMs?
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"How is it a good thing to refuse to provide our warfighters with the tools that they need?"
Perhaps you should consider that this is a loaded question. I don't think HN needs this sort of Argumentum ad Passiones.
Why are you asking this question? You know what the answer is, you've just arbitrarily decided that it's specious in an attempt to frame rebuttals as unreasonable.
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> If we need safety, we need Anthropic to be not too far behind (at least for now, before Anthropic possibly becomes evil)
I don't think it's going to be as easy to tell as you think that they might be becoming evil before it's too late if this doesn't seem to raise any alarm bells to you that this is already their plan
The world would be so much nicer if there were just fewer pragmatists shitting up the place for everyone. We might actually handle half our externalities.