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Comment by cute_boi

16 hours ago

Honestly, if Skynet were possible, Anthropic would probably build it first and claim they had to because OpenAI is bad.

And then regulatory capture it to death. Seriously, Anthropic is top notch in their coding models, but they are not the good guys in the tech vs. product for humanity's sake debate.

  • yeah but i don't think there's any large org which is 'good guys'. Anyone who wants to become a monopoly or very very large is probably suffering from some sort of a neural condition (psychosis, if plural) which we will study 100 years from now. Right now they are rewarded but I think our little minds forget to take the negative externalities into account.

    I am working on a short story on this topic which is set in 2100s, where most humans have internalized the concept of 'having enough' after the great conflict. But some specimen have started to show signs of this syndrome again, and neuroscientists and psychologists are grappling to understand where it originated from.

  • Totally. They are the only ones who said no to letting their tech being used for illegal use cases.

    This doesn't automatically make them the great virtuous team. It just means the rest of the pack are toxic as all hell.

    • They didn’t even take the position that it was unethical to participate in surveillance and kill chains, just that the tech isn’t ready yet so it’s irresponsible to use it that way.

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  • No such thing as good or bad guys in business, only good or bad action. If you NitpickLawyer has a business, I'm sure there will be people calling for your head, no matter what your intentions are. The bigger the customer base the more "evil" you'd become. Everyone have their own interest which often conflict.

Anthropic has drawn lines with the most powerful organization in the world, that OpenAI capitulated on within hours for a small contract.

  • Their statement on this issue opened by emphasizing how eager they are to help kill people:

    >I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.

    There is no universe where this can be described as anything close to ethical.

    • It's not controversial to say that democracy is a more ethical form of government than autocracy. It's also not controversial to say that violence is sometimes justified when it's in self-defence or to prevent a greater injustice from happening. So what's the ethical objection to that statement?

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    • "ethical" is not a word that carries the connotation of a universally agreed upon set of behaviors. Different peoples, groups, and cultures vary in what they consider acceptable behavior.

  • Let me rephrase this.

    Anthropic played a really well orchestrated marketing gimmick so that they would be in the headlines for a couple days bringing awareness to non-tech people on how they are supposedly the good guys. They then backpedaled all of this and are in contract with the DoD once the headlines passed.

    But this obviously worked as you now believe they are the good guys

Exactly.

This good guy ("AI Safety") versus bad guy is all marketing gimmicks. I'm old enough that it reminds me of Google "don't be evil".

What I find worse is that some people actually believe Anthropic are really the good guys.