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Comment by foobar_______

5 days ago

The marketing has really, really worked for so many developers that will proudly and unironically proclaim that Anthropic are the 'Good Guys'.

Curious what your idea would be here for a truly good actor in this space; no AI development?

  • OpenAI's training is better suited to developing models that don't have these tendencies

  • Not the direct person you asked, but my answer would be alignment, interpretability, and policymaking. Perhaps improving existing usage? Helping grandma create reminders doesn't require advancing the AI state-of-the-art.

    • They are state of the art at all 3! As are other labs. Of all the labs they seem to take alignment and interpretability the most seriously to the point where they are hampering their own revenue in service of trying to not cause problems while also being in an incredibly competitive space.

      All AI companies are trying to do all of what you’re saying. The issue is you can’t do that for long without a frontier system. Or you become a completely different, far less profitable company.

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    • Unilateral disarmament doesn't work though. If Anthropic is worried about this, just letting OpenAI win does seem genuinely worse.

    • “Alignment” as a goal always ignores the “with what set of interests”, because there is an attempt to maintain ambiguity for different audiences (particularly, users, and non-users who seem themselves as the arbiter of broad social norms) to read in their own interests, when the actual answer is always the interests of the actor pursuing “alignment”.

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  • Probably MistralAI or any of the Chinese companies that aren't throwing billions down the drain while American society lacks healthcare, childcare, and good wages.

    • American society has higher wages than almost any other developed nation [1], so it's objectively incorrect to say the US doesn't have good wages. It chooses to make you pay for private childcare and healthcare, both of which are high-quality but stupid expensive. It's a tradeoff like anything else a nation/society creates and prioritizes.

      No idea how that connects to the idea that Mistral or DeepSeek are somehow the "good guys" though?

      [1]https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/average-annual-wages...

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    • You want Anthropic to fund your healthcare or something? Also, have you seen the impact of these models on healthcare? Also most of our GDP growth this year is from AI buildouts, would you rather that be negative?

      And not even considering: Chinese AI companies are the good guys???

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    • None of the money being spent by Anthropic was going to go towards healthcare or childcare.

It's a five horse race between Alphabet, Meta, xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Alphabet dropped "don't be evil"; Meta's CEO called their own users "dumb fucks" for trusting him and also clearly thinks "super-intelligence" is just a buzzword given how he tries to sell it; xAI's model called itself "Mecha Hitler"; and OpenAI's CEO was temporarily fired by the board for a lack of candor.

It's very easy to be "the good guys" with this competition.

  • But it doesn't make you the good guy, it makes you the best of a bad bunch. The least bad. Dario gets a boner every time he talks about taking your job.

    • Does a good job of hiding it. The guy looks miserable in half the photos I see.