Comment by philip1209
4 months ago
We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him.
All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around the Pentagon's decisions, not Anthropic's. And nobody seems interested in examining whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI lab actually is one. That seems like a story worth writing.
> whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI lab actually is one
FWIW I have two(!!) close friends working for Anthropic, one for nearly two years and one for about 4 months.
Both of them tell me that this is not just marketing, that the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere, and that this was the most surprising part about joining Anthropic for them. They insist the culture is actually genuine which is practically unicorn rarity in corporate America.
We have worked for FAANG so I know where they're coming from; this got me to drop my cynicism for once and I plan on interviewing with them soon. Hopefully I can answer this question for myself.
Yeah, every engineer in the bay area has a way of framing the business they work for as a benign force for good... Until they find themselves working somewhere else, then suddenly they have a lot to say about the unacceptable things going on there.
From the outside, I find Anthropic's hyperbolic marketing to be an indication that they are basically the same as every other bay area tech startup - more or less nice folks who are primarily concerned with money and status. That's not a condemnation, but I reject all the "do no evil" fanfare as conveniently self serving.
My model is that Anthropic was founded by OpenAI engineers who self-selected for safety-consciousness. However, it's still subject to the same problem: power corrupts. I think they are better than OpenAI but they are definitely sliding.
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> every engineer in the bay area has a way of framing the business they work for as a benign force for good
This isn't remotely true in my experience. The senior folks I know at Meta, for example, pretty much concede they're ersatz drug dealers.
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TBH I have worked at multiple FAANG and I don't know anyone other than maybe new grads that actually drank the koolaid.
Certainly most of us know we are just in it for the money, and the soul-grinding profit machine will continue to grind souls for profit regardless of what we want.
So that's why it is surprising to me when my (fairly senior) grizzled ex-FAANG friends, that share the same view, start waxing poetic about Anthropic being different and genuine. I think "maybe it is" and decide to interview. IDK, I guess some part of me wants to believe that nice things can exist.
Indeed. The bad behavior is emergent, where most individual intentions are good. Good story, bad outcome.
I find it bizarre even the public image of Anthropic is seen as ethical after the Department of War debacle, in which they themselves admitted they had basically no qualms with their tech being used for war and slaughter at all except two very very thin lines, namely mass surveillance of American citizens and fully automated weaponry with their current models.
It only showed they were marginally more ethical than OpenAI and XAI which isn't saying much.
Anthropic has two principles they're willing to stand behind, even when it costs them. That's not a lot, but OpenAI only has one principle: look out for number one.
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The idea that it's not okay to arm the military is a position of privilege. The ethical issues are around how the military chooses to use its abilities, not around giving them the tools to do their jobs. We're talking about folks who are willing to give their lives up for others. If you're not going to serve yourself you should at least be willing to help them live. This has nothing to do with whether or not you support the political uses of the military. If world war 3 breaks out and you are forced to serve, you may find yourself feeling differently.
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Maybe people inside the company think Anthropic behaves ethically, which says something scary about either their ethical standards or their general awareness, considering how much documented unethical behavior we've seen from Anthropic leadership.[1]
[1] "Unless Its Governance Changes, Anthropic Is Untrustworthy" https://anthropic.ml/
If you know even the basics of ethics then such claims are clearly nonsense. There is no stable context independent ethical behaviour. This is a great example of the dangers of motivated reasoning.
I have multiple friends at Anthropic. I can second this. One thing I notice about Anthropic culture is that it is unusually kind.
So much so that I worry they won't be Machiavellian enough to survive. Hope I am wrong.
You can still be kind and guard against idiot strong men. Do the right thing, for the right reasons always brings peace. There will always be people that take advantage of that, but if you stay in the right frame, eventually people that matter will see it. And, at the same time, thats not always the case and then I just chalk it up to divine intervention or some larger purpose I am unable to see with my limited mind.
>the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere
Anthropic is emphatically not safe. None of the AI labs with customers (i.e., excluding a few small nonprofits whose revenue comes from donations) are anything like safe -- because of extinction risk. The famous positive regard that Anthropic employees have for their organization's mission means almost nothing because there have been hundreds of quite destructive cults and political parties whose members believed that theirs is the most ethical and benign organization ever.
The best thing you can say about Anthropic is that if you have to support some AI lab by becoming a customer, investor or employee, it is slightly less dangerous for the world to support Anthropic than OpenAI although IMHO (and I admit I am in a minority on this among extinction-risk activists) it is slightly less dangerous to support Google Deep Mind or Mistral than Anthropic.
All four organizations I mentioned should be shut down tomorrow with their assets returned to shareholders.
The current crop of services provided by the leading AI labs are IMHO positive on net in their effect of people and society, but the leading AI labs are spending a large fraction of the 100s of billions of dollars they've received from investors on creating more powerful models, and they might succeed in their goal of creating models that are much more powerful than the ones they have now, which is when most of the danger would manifest.
The leaders of all of the leading AI labs have the ambition of completely transforming society and the world through AI.
I think cynicism is deserved just from observing Dario's remarks.
Im curious — how do ethical and safety conscious manifest themselves there? Is it more cultural or process driven? Do you have any examples?
> the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere
I wonder what Anthropic tries to achieve by spreading such blatant lies with their bot accounts. I'm definitely not buying anything from a company so morally corrupt to smear the competition while claiming to be somehow "ethical". And I'm not talking just about this thread, it's a recurring pattern on Reddit.
Are your friends also credited in Silicon Valley (2014)?
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It might stick tbh. Their PBC+LTBT structure severely limits the power of shareholders. https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust
For what it’s worth, the story, while focused on OpenAI, is not uncritical of Anthropic. It explores whether there is a wider race to the bottom in terms of safety, and erosion of even some of Anthropic’s commitments.
I think you might be surprised that more and more Software Engineers are souring on Anthropic (the company) and the decisions the company has made recently. Not the whole drama with the US Government, but them locking down the usage of plans to their own tooling.
That really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, as ultimately one might have a favorite tool, then suddenly they are forced to use another tool.
There may be a reason why Altman is talked about a lot. This article in particular surfaces real information and new perspectives we've not heard in this level of detail before on some pretty significant topics that will be impacting you, me, and pretty much everyone we know not only today but well into the future.
You have a point in that Anthropic deserves some coverage too and that there are interesting perspectives that we've not heard of on that front either.
But just because that's true doesn't mean this article isn't very much relevant and needed.
Because it is.
The New Yorker has given plenty of coverage about Anthropic in their past issues earlier this year.
After the US launched its attack on Iran, the ethical AI lab's CEO wrote: "Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences." - https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war
"how easy it is, for those of us who play no part in public affairs, to sneer at the compromises required of those who do" - robert harris
Not making any value judgements, but I can see how one might value their interpretability research higher than what the ceo says in a time where the corrupt, criminal executive branch is muscling in to everything from what's written on currency, to journalistic sources. I generally blame fascists before i blame those unable or unwilling to resist them. though obviously, ideally, we'd all lock arms and, together through friendship, crush authoritarians and fascists.
They are a private company. They have zero obligation to sell anything to any part of the government or military. The only reason they are involved in "public affairs" is because they want to profit from the government. Moreover, long before this DoW controversy, they had plenty of nationalist and anti-China rhetoric in their press releases, more so than the other AI firms.
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Seriously blame anyone other than the fucking abuser. These people
Not sure that quote has aged well from a close personal friend and spirited defender of Peter Mandelson.
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It's not sneering. Anthropic constantly puts itself out as some sort of moral arbiter when they are no different from any other business, as your quote suggests.
“I was only following orders”—not a legitimate defense for some footsoldier.
“I had the burden of impacting public affairs through my wildly succesful corporation”—poor them.
OP says they’ve been working on this for 18 months. Most of what you’ve said wasn’t the case until much more recently.
We should stop talking about potential problems or perpetrators, when we have talked about them “enough”?
That would be irrational.
We should give air time to other problems?
I think everyone agrees with that.
You have managed to distill a surprisingly pure vintage of false dichotomy, from a near Platonic varietal of whataboutism.
Fuck that. The whataboutism term is used to much to sideline an marginalize different view points. I really hate this use of it. We are too engaged in being right about everything.
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Normies don't know what an "Anthropic" is. They use ChatGPT. Particularly sharp normies might know that ChatGPT is made by OpenAI, and the sharpest might know that Sam Altman is the CEO.
Now, they may have heard the word "Anthropic" due to recent media coverage. But they don't know what it is and don't remember what it makes. The fact that all businesses use "Anthropic" is about as relevant to them as knowing the overseas shipping company for all the shit they buy off Amazon.
So articles about OAI will always produce more revenue for the media, because it's related to what normies actually use day to day.