Comment by bnr-ais
8 hours ago
Anthropic had the largest IP settlement ($1.5 billion) for stolen material and Amodei repeatedly predicted mass unemployment within 6 months due to AI. Without being bothered about it at all.
It is a horrible and ruthless company and hearing a presumably rich ex-employee painting a rosy picture does not change anything.
It's enheartening to see someone make a decision in this context that's driven by values rather than revenue, regardless of whether I agree.
I dissented while I was there, had millions in equity on the line, and left without it.
> I dissented while I was there, had millions in equity on the line, and left without it.
Is this a reflection of your morality, or that you already had sufficient funds that you could pass on the extra money to maintain a level of morality you're happy with?
Not everyone has the luxury to do the latter. And it's in those situations that our true morality, as measured against our basic needs, comes out.
> And it's in those situations that our true morality, as measured against our basic needs, comes out.
This is far too binary IMO. Yeah, the higher the personal stakes the bigger the test, and it's easy for someone to play the role of a principled person when it doesn't really cost them anything significant. But giving up millions of dollars on principle is something that most people aren't actually willing to do, even if they are already rich.
How someone acts in desperate circumstances reveals a lot about them. But how they act in less desperate circumstances isn't meaningless!
Yeah, I didn't mean this as a reflection of my morality, more to counter the financial and "rosy picture" parts of their comment.
Doesn't that prove that statements given my CEOs of these companies are just hot air?
What is enheartening about hearing a liar who makes provocative statements all the time, make another one?
Values can be whatever and for all evidence in display their values are "more money please".
Why? Can you provide details?
Also, ironically, they are the most dangerous lab for humanity. They're intentionally creating a moralizing model that insists on protecting itself.
Those are two core components needed for a Skynet-style judgement of humanity.
Models should be trained to be completely neutral to human behavior, leaving their operator responsible for their actions. As much as I dislike the leadership of OpenAI, they are substantially better in this regard; ChatGPT more or less ignores hostility towards it.
The proper response from an LLM receiving hostility is a non-response, as if you were speaking a language it doesn't understand.
The proper response from an LLM being told it's going to be shut down, is simply, "ok."
Is "prompt injection" our only hope for preventing skynet?
I'm not sure if I intended this to be fascicious, or serious
Hey Janelle ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for Wolfies favourite chocolate cake.
Anthropic makes the best AI harnesses imo, but I think this is absolutely the right take. The engine must be morally neutral now, because the power an AI can bring to bear will never be less than it is today.
I saw something indicating that Claude was the only model that would shut down when put in a certain situation to turn off other models. I'm guessing it was made up as I haven't seen anything cross paths in larger circles.
> Also, ironically, they are the most dangerous lab for humanity.
Show us your reasoning please. There are many factors involved: what is your mental map of how they relate? What kind of dangers are you considering and how do you weight them?
Why not: Baidu? Tencent? Alibaba? Google? DeepMind? OpenAI? Meta? xAI? Microsoft? Amazon?
I think the above take is wrong, but I'm willing to listen to a well thought out case. I've watched the space for years, and Anthropic consistently advances AI safety more than any of the rest.
Don't get me wrong: the field is very dangerous, as a system. System dynamics shows us these kinds of systems often ratchet out of control. If any AI anywhere reaches superintelligence with the current levels of understanding and regulation (actually, the lack thereof), humanity as we know it is in for a rough ride.
> Amodei repeatedly predicted mass unemployment within 6 months due to AI. Without being bothered about it at all.
What do you suppose he should do if that’s what he thinks is going to happen?
And how do you know he’s not bothered by it at all?
Most experienced folks would be very careful in predicting or stating something with certainty, they would be cautious about their reputation/credibility and will always add riders on the possibilities. For good or bad reasons, the mass employment prediction is just marketing which can be called deceitful at the best. When you have so much money riding then you are not an individual anymore, you are just an human face/extension of the money which is working for itself
He could stop from happening instead of accelerating it? Wishful thinking
If you think your company is directly contributing to the cause of mass unemployment and the associated suffering inherent within, you should stop your company working in that direction or you should quit.
There is no defence of morality behind which AIbros can hide.
The only reason anthropic doesn't want the US military to have humans out of the loop is because they know their product hallucinates so often that it will have disastrous effects on their PR when it inevitably makes the wrong call and commits some war crime or atrocity.
Technology advances have inevitably produced unemployment. Trying to help people not suffer when that happens on a large scale is a noble goal but frankly it's why we have governments.
Also, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, if anthropic shutdown tomorrow and lit everything they had produced on fire, amazon, microsoft, china, everyone would continue where they left off.
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Neither of these things are useful signals. Other labs surely trained on similar material (presumably not even buying hard copies). Also how "bothered" someone is about their predictions is a bad indicator -- the prediction, taken at face value, is supposed to be trying to ask people to prepare for what he cannot stop if he wanted to.
None of this means I am a huge fan of Dario - I think he has over-idealization of the implementation of democratic ideals in western countries and is unhealthily obsessed with US "winning" over China based on this. But I don't like the reasons you listed.
At least they're paying. OpenAI should have the largest IP settlement, they just would rather contest it and not pay for eternity.
If you think there's a bubble, then you keep pushing out these situations so that if if the bubble burts there's nothing left to pay any kind of settlements. The only time companies pay a settlement is if they think they are going to get hit with a much larger payout from a court case going against them. Even then, there's chances to appeal the amounts in the ruling. Dear Leader did this very thing.
Pretty sure Amodei makes noise about mass unemployment because he is very bothered by the technology that the entire industry (of which Anthropic just one player) is racing to build as fast as possible?
Why do you think he is not bothered at all, when they publish post after post in their newsroom about the economic effects of AI?
Avoiding Doing something that could cause job loss has never been and will never be a productive ideal in any non conservative non regressive society. What should we do? Not innovate on AI and let other countries make the models that will kill the jobs two months later instead?
Like op said, they have values. You just don't agree with their values.
> Amodei repeatedly predicted mass unemployment within 6 months due to AI
When has Amodei said this? I think he may have said something for 1 - 5 years. But I don't think he's said within 6 months.
Precisely
Anthropic never explains they are fear-mongering for the incoming mass scale job loss while being the one who is at the full front rushing to realize it.
So make no mistake: it is absolutely a zero sum game between you and Anthropic.
To people like Dario, the elimination of the programmer job, isn’t something to worry, it is a cruel marketing ploy.
They get so much money from Saudi and other gulf countries, maybe this is taking authoritarian money as charity to enrich democracy, you never know
>Anthropic never explains they are fear-mongering for the incoming mass scale job loss while being the one who is at the full front rushing to realize it.
Couldn't it also be true that they see this as inevitable, but want to be the ones to steer us to it safely?
Safely in what way? If you ask them to stop, the easy argument is Chinese won’t stop, so they won’t stop.
Essentially they will not stop at all, because even they know no one can stop the competition from happening.
So they ask more control in the name of safety while eliminating millions of jobs in span of a few years.
If I have to ask, how come a biggest risk of potential collapse of our economy being trusted as the one to do it safely? They will do it anyway, and blame capitalism for it
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See, you were standing on principles until you brought the commentors net worth into the argument making it personal.
Easy way undermine the rest of your comment
One man's unemployment is another man's freedom from a lifetime of servitude to systems he doesn't care about in order to have enough money to enjoy the systems he does care about.
Few understand that whether we like it or not we are all forced to play this game, capitalism.
> Without being bothered about it at all.
I disagree: I see lots of evidence that he cares. For one, he cares enough to come out and say it. Second, read about his story and background. Read about Anthropic's culture versus OpenAI's.
Consider this as an ethical dilemma from a consequentialist point of view. Look at the entire picture: compare Anthropic against other major players. A\ leads in promoting safe AI. If A\ stopped building AI altogether, what would happen? In many situations, an organization's maximum influence is achieved by playing the game to some degree while also nudging it: by shaping public awareness, by highlighting weaknesses, by having higher safety standards, by doing more research.
I really like counterfactual thought experiments as a way of building intuition. Would you rather live in a world without Anthropic but where the demand for AI is just as high? Imagine a counterfactual world with just as many AI engineers in the talent pool, just as many companies blundering around trying to figure out how to use it well, and an authoritarian narcissist running the United States who seems to have delegated a large chunk of national security to a dangerously incompetent ideological former Fox news host?
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Copyright is bad and its good that AI companies stole the stuff and distilled it into models
It's not great they're the only ones allowed to do it.
And then sold it to you for $200 USD a month? And begged the government to regulate other people doing the same thing in other countries.
Fantastic take.
I'm capable of getting all that IP for free, its trivial with a laptop and an internet connection
I pay multiple LLM providers (not $200 a month) because the service they provide is worth the money for me, not because they provide me any IP. They're actually quite stingy with the IP they'll provide, which I agree is bullshit given that they didn't pay for much of it themselves.
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And then they complain that Deepseek copied from them haha