Comment by baq
2 days ago
Foundational model provider manifesto:
‘While there’s value in safety, we value the Pentagon’s dollars more’
2 days ago
Foundational model provider manifesto:
‘While there’s value in safety, we value the Pentagon’s dollars more’
It turns out the biggest threat to AI safety is capitalism, who would have thought
Certainly not the prior century-and-a-half's worth of books and films.
And I still run into naysayers claiming that we cannot extract valuable opinions or warnings from fiction because "they're fictional". Fiction comes from ideas. Fiction is not meant to model reality but approximate it to make a point either explicitly or implicitly.
Just because they're not 1:1 model of reality or predictions doesn't mean that the ideas they communicate are worthless.
Anthropic is a public benefit corp
And OpenAI was founded as a non profit, back in the time it was open
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I don’t get it. Even the Soviet Union used money. Simply paying for stuff isn’t necessarily capitalism? Or are you suggesting Anthropic should be state-owned?
No, capitalism is prioritising profit over all other priorities, as we see happening here.
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Using money as a medium to facilitate exchange of goods and services is not capitalism. Abandoning one of your core principles in the pursuit of money, or more charitably because not doing so means your competitors will make more money and overtake you in the marketplace is an outgrowth of capitalism
In the Soviet Union the reasons might have been "to beat the Capitalists", "for the pride of our country" or "Stalin asked us to and saying no means we get sent to Siberia". Though a variant of the last one may well have happened here, and the justification we read is just the one less damaging to everyone involved
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Nick Land has basically been saying this since the 90s, if you can look past all the rhetoric
Exactly. He recently said the following in an interview:
"AI safety and anti-capitalism [...] are at least strongly analogous, if not exactly the same thing." [0]
[0] Nick Land (2026). A Conversation with Nick Land (Part 2) by Vincent Lê in Architechtonics Substack. Retrieved from vincentl3.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-nick-land-part-a4f