Comment by jameson
3 months ago
I don't quite understand the intent of such article other than to promote themselves given an odd timing that the company is planning on going public, so I can only conclude that this is just part of the IPO roadshow.
LLMs certainly have made significant changes to our lives, but I haven't yet to see any extraordinary improvement it brought to me which makes me skeptical about their claims.
_if_ it solves many of our problems of great magnitude, why haven't Anthropic used it to solve significant problems we, humans, face? Cancer, Alzheimer's, education, finding new materials, fission power plant, etc.
Because they're going after the biggest problem of all first: labor costs.
/s but not to a lot of people
Do you not think that the allocation of human time is one of the world’s biggest problems?
Honestly, not really.
We can have a philosophical debate about work, the history of work and its relationship to human psychology in the 21st century but the bottom line is that there are 8+ billion people on the planet and, of those who are "working age", the vast majority of people, lacking meaningful capital, can only secure income by selling their time and labor.
There's absolutely no evidence that if we come up with a way to "reallocate human time" and change the structure of our civilization (using AI of course) tomorrow, the masses would benefit. There's plenty of evidence that the people who control AI or have the capital to employ it will use it to accumulate as much power and wealth for themselves as they can.
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Reallocating human time is also going to cause problems.
But it’s a great short term business opportunity for AI vendors and it was Anthropic who went all in on being knowledge worker outsourcing in a big way first whilst OpenAI thought they’d replace Google in search.
I think Anthropic had the better business strategy.
We can’t reallocate time unless there is an alternative source of income. But all these companies just want to extract wealth, not distribute it.
For the Capitalist crowd, YES it is the biggest cost. The next is energy. Imagine a world where your research and development is all AI and the production is all automated by robots. Instant product to sell to the masses who has no money because no one is working.
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It’s a problem for capitalists, not the people themselves
The people want cheaper prices, affordable housing, affordable healthcare
Capitalism has decided that these problems aren’t worth solving. Instead, we must optimize for spam and slop (and call it “distribution”)
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Or: Anthropic genuinely believes the future scenarios they outline are realistic possibilities, and they want more people to take them seriously.
I find this version unlikely, since companies very rarely genuinely believe what they preach in PR campaigns. It's always some sales and marketting dudes and gals trying to polish up something as something more than it is. Which is very annoying. We can now choose between Anthropic being the one exception to this, while having huuuuge incentive to hype up their product, or we just write it off as more marketting fluff.
I would be very surprised if this is an actual thought-out PR strategy. I am far more inclined to believe that their employees are just bought-in to the future where AI is genuinely transformative.
Whether they are right of wrong is another matter, but their claims also don’t seem too far out of the realm of possibility to me.
Coding agents have fundamentally changed my day-to-day job. In the last year, my work has shifted from me writing all of my code, to me writing very little code and spending most of my time on understanding problems better and setting direction, and reviewing, verifying, and polishing the output of coding agents. It has been quite a drastic change.
It is not that outlandish to suggest that coding agents could continue to improve at such a drastic rate over the next year. And the implications of that could be quite large! Even just the implications of more white-collar workers adopting tools like Cowork seems potentially very large, with tools that already exist today. It seems sensible to at least consider this as a possibility.
Dario is no John hammond though. That'd be altman. He actually has the discipline and background as an ai scientist to tell what the potential failure modes are. You're right, he might still be just hyping things up, but generally i'd give more benefit of doubts to anthropic. Precisely because Dario was a scientist and I'd stand by it. People who get their phd in science already self-select, or proven at least to be made of different stuff.
Likewise, people don't as easily blame ilya for 'hyping things up' when he said these things.
Also talk about incentives, there are also incentives to lower their valuation. If you wanna be vigilant against social engineering i'd be wary of that too.
These are moot anyway though cause the article isnt even making any super strong claim. If you read it it's no big deal
This is obviously the case to me, but I think HN is very anti-AI.
I genuinely don't believe that they sat down in a board room and said "yeah lets specifically release this now before an IPO so we can juice it!" They haven't even announced an IPO date. So is every blog on capabilities before that date just "pumping up the value of the stock before the IPO?"
If they actually have concerns they can communicate them directly and privately. There are less than 10 companies, in only 2 countries, with advanced enough AI programs to qualify for this type of concern. And Anthropic has the phone numbers for all of them.
Companies do tons of communication and work directly, without press releases or blog posts. If a statement is released publicly, it is done for a PR purpose.
It is not solely or even primarily the big AI labs that would need to prepare. They have a better idea of what’s coming, and they’re positioned to benefit from it.
It is governments, big companies, and individuals who could all experience fundamental changes if any of these predictions come true. If people within the labs believe these possibilities are around the corner, it would be responsible to try to let people know so they can be more ready if RSI suddenly hits and in a couple years time all our work is fundamentally changed.
That’s not to say I agree with their predictions, but rather I’m just saying that there are good reasons for Anthropic to publish stuff like this that are not just PR.
Have you worked for corporations long?
The article does not claim they have achieved recursive self improvement... just that it appears to be a plausible outcome given the progress of AI development in the past few years.
I don't know about you, but AI advancements have brought extraordinary improvements to me personally in my ability to be productive, in much the same ways the article outlines. I find it deeply satisfying to be able to "get ideas out of my head" faster and tackle more meaningful problems.
FWIW, it deeply concerns me how much power and capability is being centralized in the hands of so few, especially Anthropic. I, for one, hope these advancements can be scaled down to something I can have full sovereignty over and trust... in my own home.
Truly feels like witnessing the worst of capitalism and greed play out. All that compute and energy towards a narrative of reducing the need for skilled programmers. What a waste.
These people don't have our interests in mind and everyone eats it up like a blessing from a god or something. It's surreal.
I think these people do have our interests at heart, but that's largely irrelevant. Their point is that capitalist free markets don't let them act on that.
Capitalism and democracy are becoming obsolete. It's not clear what's next.
It's our collective God complex playing out and eating us up
It starts somewhere, like with this announcement.
I'm not sure why this is so difficult for you to understand.
two reasons:
1. Anthropic is an AI company. they want to get to AGI before anyone else ~~so they can lock the doors behind them~~ to ensure the supremacy of an aligned AGI that serves humankind. RSI unlocks the most value for them.
2. doing bioscience is slow and capital intensive. robotics lags way behind, so that's a lot of lab techs swishing flasks and plating petri dishes. they're happy to stay in silico, but there's very little productive research you can do without in vivo/in vitro experiments.
Because shush, that's why!
Agree with your point about the timing, but drawing anticipation before going ahead and solving these disease can be a good smoke test, would be beneficial even if there's an IPO or not
The benefits of AI are not designed to suit you, but the owner class. The plan is for you to be sidelined.