Comment by kyledrake
5 days ago
Considering their apparent nerfing of the end user plans in favor of enterprise clients, is Anthropic still the "more ethical AI company" like everybody loves to tell me all the time?
Assuming this isn't just a supply issue on their side, nothing says "ethical AI" like only allowing mega corporations to use it through cost barriers.
You really misunderstand what AI-doom people are worried about if you think this is anywhere near the top (or middle, or bottom) of the list of concerns.
Yeah, it's positively precious to think the specific pricing strategy for consumers is the overriding ethical concern with OpenAI, etc. I don't have any particularly strong affinity to any AI company, but comparing pricing to say mass surveillance is ... something else.
Your beautiful straw man is negated by the fact that Anthropic seems quite eager to get back on the DoD gravy train https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/blacklist...
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If you can't trust them to act ethically on the small scale, why would you expect that to turn around once it gets to a larger much more important scale?
How many government sanctioned school bombings does it take for them to quit working with said government? For now we know that number is somewhere between infinity and 1.
It literally does not register as "unethical" at any scale to have different products or prices for different customer tiers.
The question of collaboration with USG is a much more complex one, but is not the one raised above.
Edit: I'll also add that I doubt any AI-doom people "trust" Anthropic per se. The entire angle of questioning – again – misunderstands the AI-doom argument. You appear to think that if companies behave unethically, they cannot be trusted and they will not produce good outcomes, inversely: if they behave ethically, they can be trusted, and they will produce good outcomes.
Any competent AI-doomer would argue that ethics or trust are essentially irrelevant.
The entire problem is that people can act totally reasonably, even ethically, and this is not a guarantee of good outcomes. Situations can be created in which completely ethical, reasonable behavior actually produces a bad outcome. You do not need to assume people are bad in order to produce a bad outcome, and inversely you cannot assume that you will get a good outcome from good people.
"Arms races" are one class of situations that often have this characteristic. "Bureaucracy" is another class that we encounter a lot in daily life. There's a lot of them!
I don't think offering a product under a certain set of terms obligates a company to maintain that offering forever. The bait and switch is certainly annoying but seeing as they're very upfront about it you can't say you weren't warned. Don't like it? Don't use it.
Yup - who cares about x-risk or red lines for domestic mass surveillance anyways? I draw my red lines at prioritizing profitable customers when heavily resource constrained. That's the true definition of evilness!
I wouldn't call Anthropic ethical. But between Anthropic and OpenAI, Anthropic is the more ethical one
Why would you have ethics when you could get that IPO money instead?
It's unethical to price it in a way not everyone can afford?
It smells like an architecture-related issue to me. They wanted to release the model asap, but they're still implementing the fine-grained controls to constrain the model to non-subscription users.
They said they would release it back into subscriptions as capacity allows in the future. If they don't, people are going to point back at it and rake them over the coals.
The bar is just too low.
More ethical in some areas, actively user hostile in others