Comment by dwa3592
1 day ago
-- Impressive jumps in the benchmarks which automatically begs the need for newer benchmarks but why?. I don't think benchmarks are serving any purpose at this point. We have learnt that transformers can learn any function and generalize over it pretty well. So if a new benchmark comes along - these companies will syntesize data for the new benchmark and just hack it?
-- It seems like (and I'd bet money on this) that they put a lot (and i mean a ton^^ton) of work in the data synthesis and engineering - a team of software engineers probably sat down for 6-12 months and just created new problems and the solutions, which probably surpassed the difficult of SWE benchmark. They also probably transformed the whole internet into a loose "How to" dataset. I can imagine parsing the internet through Opus4.6 and reverse-engineering the "How to" questions.
-- I am a bit confused by the language used in the book (aka huge system card)- Anthropic is pretending like they did not know how good the model was going to be?
-- lastly why are we going ahead with this??? like genuinely, what's the point? Opus4.6 feels like a good enough point where we should stop. People still get to keep their jobs and do it very very efficiently. Are they really trying to starve people out of their jobs?
to your last question, yes we should! the issue isn’t us losing our 50+ hour work week jobs, it’s that our current governments and societies seem fine with the notion that unless you’re working one or more of those jobs, you should starve and be homeless.
This is a theory I can't support well beyond hypothesising about what a post-employment democracy might look like, but I strongly suspect democracy doesn't work in a world where voters neither hold any significant collective might and are not producing any significant wealth.
Democracies work because people collectively have power, in previous centuries that was partly collective physical might, but in recent years it's more the economic power people collectively hold.
In a world in which a handful of companies are generating all of the wealth incentives change and we should therefore question why a government would care about the unemployed masses over the interests of the companies providing all of the wealth?
For example, what if the AI companies say, "don't tax us 95% of our profits, tax us 10% or we'll switch off all of our services for a few months and let everyone starve – also, if you do this we'll make you all wealthy beyond you're wildest dreams".
What does a government in this situation actually do?
Perhaps we'd hope that the government would be outraged and take ownership of the AI companies which threatened to strike against the government, but then you really just shift the problem... Once the government is generating the vast majority of wealth in the society, why would they continue to care about your vote?
You kind of create a new "oil curse", but instead of oil profits being the reason the government doesn't care about you, now it's the wealth generated by AI.
At the moment, while it doesn't always seem this way, ultimately if a government does something stupid companies will stop investing in that nation, people will lose their jobs, the economy will begin to enter recession, and the government will probably have to pivot.
But when private investment, job loses and economic consequences are no longer a constraining factor, governments can probably just do what they like without having to worry much about the consequences...
I mean, I might be wrong, but it's something I don't hear people talking enough about when they talk about the plausibility of a post-employment UBI economy. I suspect it almost guarantees corruption and authoritarianism.
Everyone wouldn't starve in a few months. There is more than enough food and I have faith it'd be given out. The starvation we see today in a world where most genuinely have a chance to get out of it is nothing like a world in which people can't earn an income.
The government only has as much power as they are given and can defend, and the only way I could see that happening is via automated weapons controlled by a few- which at this point aren't enough to stop everyone. What army is going to purge their own people? Most humans aren't psychopaths.
I think it'd end in a painful transition period of "take care of the people in a just system or we'll destroy your infrastructure".
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Humans have political power because of our ability to enact violence, same as it ever was. Until the military is fully automated and theres a terminator on every corner that remains true. Even then there are more than enough armed americans to enact a guerilla campaign.
> "don't tax us 95% of our profits, tax us 10% or we'll switch off all of our services for a few months and let everyone starve – also, if you do this we'll make you all wealthy beyond you're wildest dreams".
What does a government in this situation actually do?
Nationalizes the company under the threat of violence.
> Once the government is generating the vast majority of wealth in the society, why would they continue to care about your vote?
Because of the 100 million gun owners in this country? I find it incredibly hard to believe people as a whole will lose political power because of their incredible ability to enact violence in the face of decreasing quality of life.
The only way to avoid corruption is to take power out of human hands. Historically, this had meant shifting the power to markets, but when markets cease to function in a way that allows people to feed themselves, we will need to find another way.
I hate to say it, but gold bugs, crypto bros, and AI governance people might be onto something.