Comment by paxys
2 days ago
I interviewed at Anthropic last year and their entire "ethics" charade was laughable.
Write essays about AI safety in the application.
An entire interview round dedicated to pretending that you truly only care about AI safety and not the money.
Every employee you talk to forced to pretend that the company is all about philanthropy, effective altruism and saving the world.
In reality it was a mid-level manager interviewing a mid-level engineer (me), both putting on a performance while knowing fully well that we'd do what the bosses told us to do.
And that is exactly what is happening now. The mission has been scrubbed, and the thousands of "ethical" engineers you hired are all silent now that real money is on the line.
> Every employee you talk to forced to pretend that the company is all about philanthropy, effective altruism and saving the world
I was an interviewer, and I wasn't encouraged to talk about philanthropy, effective altruism, or ethics. Maybe even slightly discouraged? My last two managers didn't even know what effective altruism was. (Which I thought was a feat to not know months into working there.)
When did you interview, and for what part of the company?
> knowing fully well that we'd do what the bosses told us to do [...] now that real money is on the line
This is a cynical take.
I didn't just do what I was told, and I dissented with $XXM in EV on the line. But I also don't work there anymore, at least one of the cofounders wasn't happy about it and complained to my manager, and many coworkers thought I had no sense of self preservation – so I might be naive.
The more realistic scenario is that a) most people have good intentions, b) there's a decision that will cause real harm, and c) it's made anyway to keep power / stay on the frontier, with the justification that the overall outcome is better. I think that's what happened here.
I do trust that you earnestly believe in the importance of ethics in AI - but at the same time, I think that may be causing you to assume that the average person cares just as much or similarly.
I've seen the same phenomenon play out in health-tech startup space. The mission is to "do good", but at the end of the day, for most leaders it's just a business and for most employees it's just a job. In fact, usually the ones who care more than that end up burning out and leaving.