Comment by neom
7 hours ago
I've had so much abuse thrown at me on here for saying this very thing over the last few years. I used to be friends with Jack back in the day, before this AI stuff even all kicked off, once you know who people really are inside, it's easy to know how they will act when the going gets rough. I'm glad they are doing the right thing, but I'm not at all surprised, nor should anyone be. Personally I believe they would go to jail/shut down/whatever before they do something objectively wrong.
> I used to be friends with Jack back in the day, before this AI stuff even all kicked off, once you know who people really are inside, it's easy to know how they will act when the going gets rough.
This sounds quite backwards to me. It's been abundantly clear in today's times that, in fact, you only really know who somebody really is when they're under stress. Most people, it seems, prefer a different facade when there is nothing at stake.
Hm, I think you kinda know what people are like by seeing what they do when they’re under no stress and feel like they are free from consequences. When they have total power in a situation. The façade drops because it’s not necessary.
If someone is in an environment where they have to do XYZ or die, their choice to do XYZ might not reflect their personality, but the environment where they have to do XYZ or die.
But if you were watching them, was there really no freedom from consequences? At least there was the risk of you thinking less of them.
I think that really cruel people want you to know when they can act with impunity, it's part of the appeal to some. The Anthropic people don't seem like that sort, at least. But plenty of horrible people have still not been that sort.
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Free from consequence. In other words, free of any stakes. Zero stress low stakes environments enable larping.
I don't know most people, so I can't speak to that. I do know Jack, and I knew how he was under stress long before any of this AI stuff. Jack Clark might very well be the most steady hand in the valley right now to be quite frank.
That is a good LinkedIn endorsement of ever I saw one!
Exactly
Not all of us know who Dario, Jared, Sam and Jack are. Some clarification is helpful. That's all, no hidden agenda!
Well I can only speak to Jack Clark. Jack was a reporter who covered my startup and then became my friend. Over the last.. I dunno, 13 year or something, we've had long deep talks about lots of things, pre-ai world: what it takes to build a big business, will QC ever become a thing, universal basic human love, kids, life, family. He is brilliant. The business I worked on that he covered went through a lot of shit that he knew about. We talked about power in business, internal politics, how things actually get built...all that stuff. Then... attention is all you need, bunch of folks grok it, he got interested... got to talking to these folks starting some little research lab to see how NN scales, so joined that lab, first 5/10 or so iirc...to head AI policy. That little lab grew, stuff happened, the next part isn't mine to share but so much as to say: Anthropic was basically born out of the expectation that this moment would come and more...extremely human focused...voices should be at the table, that is Anthropic, that idea, they left their jobs at the aforementioned lab - and started their own startup to make sure a certain tone/voice/idea was always represented. Around the summer 2024, although at this point we didn't discuss any specifics of the work at his "startup", I said to him: what comes next is going to be super hard and I know this is going to sound really stupid, but you're all going to need to be Jesus for real. I'm a Buddhist and it wasn't a literal religious comment about Christianity as a denomination, so much as... the very basics of the stuff the dude Jesus Christ espoused. He knew, they knew, that I suppose, was always the plan? So it was never unexpected to me they would act this way, that is what Anthropic is all about. Here we are.
Hah, you're right, I meant Dario Amodei, Jared Kaplan, and Sam McCandlish.
They're all cofounders of Anthropic. Dario is the CEO, Jared leads research, and Sam leads infra. Both Jared and Sam were the "responsible scaling officer", meaning they were responsible for Anthropic meeting the obligations of its commitments to building safeguards.
I think neom is referring to Jack Clark, another one of the seven cofounders.
I almost downvoted you, because this is a pretty classic LMGTFY (or now, LMLLMTFY), but on second thought, you're right. The "Dario" is clear, he's the author of TFA, but for other execs, Anthropic's fans on here should spell out their full names. Dropping all these first names feel like "inside baseball" at best, mildly culty at worst, and here outside the walls of Anthropic, we're going to see those names and think of Kushner(??), Altman, and maybe Dorsey, and get confused.
FWIW, I agree strongly w/ lebovic's toplevel take above, that Anthropic's leaders are guided by their values. Many of the responses are roughly saying, "That can't be true, because Anthropic's values aren't my values!" This misses the point completely, and I'm astounded that so many commenters are making such a basic error of mentalization.
For my part, I'm skeptical of a lot of Anthropic's values as I perceive them. I find a lot of the AI mysticism silly or even harmful, and many of my comments on this site reflect that. Also, like any real-world company, Anthropic has values that are, shall we say, compatible with surviving under capitalism -- even permitting them to steal a boatload of IP when they scanned those books!
Nonetheless, I can clearly see that it's a company that tries to stand by what it believes, and in the case of this spat with Dep't of War, I happen to agree with them.
I can agree that I thought it was jack dorsey but it looks like we are talking about jack clark [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Clark_(AI_policy_expert)]
It would be better if people could name them with their full names to avoid any confusion.
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Please don't do this here.
> it's easy to know how they will act when the going gets rough
Even if you went to burning man and your souls bonded, you only know a person at a particular point in time - people's traits flanderize, they change, they emphasize different values, they develop different incentives or commitments. I've watched very morally certain people fall to mania or deep cynicism over the last 10 years as the pillars of society show their cracks.
That said, it is heartening to know that some would predict anyone in Silicon Valley would still take a moral stance. But it would do better if not the same day he fires 4000 people to do the "scary big cut" for a shift he sees happening. I guess we're back to Thatcherisms, where "There Is No Other Option" to justify our conservatism.
Your comment reminds me of a story. John Adams and Lafayette met in Massachusetts something like ~49 years after the revolution. (Lafayette went on a US tour to celebrate the upcoming 50 year anniversary of independence.) Supposedly after the meeting Adams said "this was not the Lafayette I knew" and Lafayette said "this was not the Adams I knew".
In these days of the Epstein mails, it's worth remembering one thing that's become clear: Epstein was an extremely nice guy. He seemed kind, sincere, interested in what you were doing, civilized etc.
But to quote Little Red Riding Hood in Stephen Sondheim's musical: Nice is different than good. It's hard to accept if people you really like do horrible things. It's tempting to not believe what you hear, or even what you see. And Epstein was good at getting you to really like him, if he wanted to.
That doesn't mean we should be suspicious of niceness. It just means that we should realize, again, nice is different than good.
"people's traits flanderize": nice
>Even if you went to burning man and your souls bonded ...
I'll take: List of places I never want to bond my soul with someone at for one thousand, please.
They get an air conditioned trailer and pay "sherpas" to do their chores, so its basically just a hotel suite
Oh, that's the best place for souls to bond.
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Huh? Why would they be in prison??
> they have also threatened to designate us a “supply chain risk”—a label reserved for US adversaries
They are US adversaries if they don’t give to USA what they want… so as an adversary that doesn’t do what’s told to fit in line… you must go to prison.
This is insanely naive
Cynicism isn't always correct.
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The nature of evil is that it's straight down the road paved with good intentions.