Comment by holmesworcester
3 days ago
The idea that AI companies scaremonger to sell models is a silly meme.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence. This is part of a clear historical record that is available for anyone to Google. Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.
Arbitrary imposition of export controls is also part of the history of frontier tech. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Obviously their statements are insincere, because they are building the bloody things. If they were sincere that AI is like nuclear weapons, then they would be devoting all their cash and energy into lobbying the government to nationalize them and treat AI like nuclear weapons. They would not be attempting to IPO and they for sure would not sell their weapon-like thing to the general public.
I think this is a reasonable point, but a better comparison might be to nuclear energy. I think the frontier labs sincerely believe that AI can be developed at great benefit to humanity, and they clearly want to lead that push, but they also sincerely believe there is a real catastrophic risk.
They all believe that they are building the machine of doom. The thing that drives the moral dilemma to continue doing it is simply the prisoner's dilemma - the cat is out of the bag, if they don't do it, another (less ethical?) actor would do it.
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My personal issue in comparing LLM progress and risk as labs publicly predict it with nuclear power in the middle of the 20th century is that the processes by which it works where fairly quickly well understood and the risk could thus be realistically assessed. Some powerplant operators did not adhere with best practices, but building a relatively safe nuclear power plant was not impossible given appropriate effort and spending. Heck, according to some, we could have even gone far more fail-safe approaches (molten salt) if military interest haden’t been at play.
With what is predicted by frontier labs for LLMs, all of this is not the case. We are far further from any understanding of how these models work internally than in the early days of fission and, if this was actually creating a truly intelligent, autonomous entity, alignment seems unsolvable as well, at least the way it is proposed.
It’s why I have from the get go been critical of this doomsday framing and tended to always dislike it. This is basically the outcome that was inevitable given the framing and it was bought to prevent far less stringent, but more actionable possible regulation that labs very much wanted to avoid.
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Some of them believe they are building God, and if they can get there first with their God, they can build it in their image and commandeer the free choice of the rest of humanity by force to ensure there will be no God but their God.
I wish I was kidding. At least that faction is less harmful than the ones who want to use murder to stop AI research.
That's not how nerds think. You can believe there's a high chance of what you're working on being dangerous and still be unable to stop working on it. As Oppenheimer put it, "when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it".
Accelerationism is an established political philosophy. Why is it obvious that they are insincere when they could equally think that the only way to control it is to be the ones building it?
History has shown over and over that that strategy is doomed to fail - see communism, nuclear energy, or meddling with the Middle East for some arbitrary recent examples.
Thank you for writing this. It’s such a classic example of ”do what I say not what I do” but in reverse. Why would you ever judge a CEO or company by their statements and not their actions. Scaremongering is incredibly efficient for marketing, the fact that both players are using it to drive monetary gain is kind of a tell.
They aren't saying there's a 100% chance of doom.
They believe there's a non-zero chance of doom so would rather an org that prioritises safety to be the one at the frontier, on the assumption (I presume) that there will be a frontier regardless.
They believe in the danger of out of control super-intelligence. The generous interpretation is that they believe they can contain it.
This assumes that they believe two things which I don't think they do: 1. that the US is the only place where this will be developed, and 2. that the government will be able to handle this better than anyone else.
It remains possible that Altman and Amodei are sincere: they might believe that AI is dangerous like nuclear weapons, but there's no way to stop its development (especially since it would need to be stopped globally, not just in the US and countries the US can influence) and they consider themselves to be more likely to do a good job of it than their competitors.
No, that's what *you* would apparently do.
Some of us think it's bad for governments to have unequal access to nuclear weapons, as it turns a deterrent into a gun-in-a-knife-fight that lets them stab whoever they want with impunity, lest they shoot anyone who tries to interfere.
See: Russia invading Ukraine.
Perhaps more like nuclear power? Potentially very beneficial but also dangerous.
JFYI for-profit companies make pretty OK nuclear power plants
This. People who care about animal cruelty dont go building largest ever meatfarms and slaughterhouses.
People who opposing arms manufacturing and gun violence dont jump to work for gun companies.
People who really want AI benefit all humanity dont stick working with lying CEOs who want to convert company from a non-profit.
Etc. So many examples.
One major source of conflict in AI policy / AI safety is that very smart people have radically diverging intuitions about how dangerous superintelligence is and how difficult it is to align.
A first group dismisses the problem entirely, saying intelligence != power and AI doesn't have "drives".
A second group believes that alignment is solvable through engineering and iteration, and that we have the best chance of surviving if people with the right intentions are the ones working on it.
A third believes that aligning a superintelligence is a unique category of problem, that we are nowhere close to the level of scientific understanding needed to achieve it, that we only have one shot (because once a sufficiently powerful superintelligence exists it will thwart all future attempts, and alignment techniques that worked on dumber AI will likely not work on it), and that the world will have to coordinate to avoid killing ourselves off by building superintelligence before we understand how to do it safely, the way we have coordinated to avoid nuclear war.
The Anthropic and OpenAI founders, Elon, and Anthropic engineers are mostly in the second category. Some safety people at Anthropic and OAI are in the third category, but leading people in the third category think that pure safety roles at the labs are potentially impactful enough to be worth not quitting.
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> Obviously their statements are insincere, because they are building the bloody things. If they were sincere that AI is like nuclear weapons, then they would be devoting all their cash and energy into lobbying the government to nationalize them...
This comment makes no sense. Id you think this tech is dangerous and happening soon and clearly they think the safest way to have it releases is to do so first and model safe ways of doing things. Clearly we cab agree or disagree it's internally consistent what they are doing and aligns with their statements.
And you and OP think the best way to be first to release this is tie all of their funding for the exponentially growing expense is to they notoriously slow moving, bureaucratic government includinf funding process? And the best way to develop it is to directly tie their fate to this notoriously capricious administration?
These comments make no sense. Even if you're completely against Anthropic those comments make no sense.
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I oppose gun violence and I would go to work for a firearms manufacturer.
I oppose nuclear war, and I would go to work in the supply chain for nuclear weapons.
Deterrence and game theory are very real.
They don't stick working for sama, they split off and found Anthropic.
It's the narcissism.
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“OpenAI's CEO says he's scared of GPT-5”
https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/chatgpt/op...
Marketing or actual fear? We’ve got 5 and 5.5 out now… he compared 5 to the Manhattan project. AI may one day be an economic Manhattan project but GPT 5 wasn’t it.
It’s a meme because they overdo it.
At some intelligence capability there can be catastrophic risk, the fact that we don't yet have any catastrophe doesn't mean the risk wasn't real. It's similar to new viruses which don't lead to outbreaks, the correct takeaway isn't "oh you were insane to panic bc nothing happened". There is small risk (and increasing) of huge harms with each improvement
The risk wasn't real because we now have access to the model and can see with our own eyes how this model could never have posed a risk to begin with.
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Funny they're never afraid of their competitor's models, but the ones they build (and release) are just soooooo scary.
Very true.
Every public statement out of a CEO's mouth is marketing. It would literally be violating fiduciary duty to be saying anything else.
Did you watch the linked video: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mbafk7/openai_ceo...
It all sounds pretty accurate and reasonable to me if you watch it.
Also fable was good but not Manhattan level project, i honestly did not find a major difference between it and gpt 5.5
Sam Altman is not one of those people. But other founders certainly felt that way.
Sam Altman doesn't really know all that much about LLMs, he's a sales/marketing guy, not technical.
So it doesn't really matter what he thinks
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Imagine for a few minutes, and really let it sink in what you could do, ask, plan, or learn, if you had the full undivided attention GPT or Claude. not a commercial, guard railed, fine tunes, beat into submission version that is splintered into hundreds of millions of iterations to chat with every one. The open weights original pre consumer grade version. Then, even then you know that it's the worst and dumbest its every going to be, The next time you blink it's exponentially more. Some people don't think about what an exponential curve really means. Others are sitting in the front seat trying not to shit themselves and appear like reasonable normal people. How one responds to that is as unknown as what's going to happen after we cross that line, but it's coming and holy shit so many people haven't even wrapped their head around how much bigger it is than the petty human things we distract ourselves with. Being in awe and terrified and wanting to run and to be apart of the most significant thing in our entire existence of being sentient is normal. We have nothing to compare it to. Nothing to base predictions on. We ar about to have company for the first time. We're going to have a conversation with something other than ourselves since we formed the ability to speak. One minute to the next will pass q It's all or nothing. Like it or not. It's too late. buckle up.
> Imagine […] what you could do, ask, plan, or learn, if you had the full undivided attention GPT or Claude. not a commercial, guard railed, fine tunes, beat into submission version that is splintered into hundreds of millions of iterations to chat with every one.
That is not how it works. It is not “splitered”, there is no divided attention.
There is nothing to indicate that LLMs are improving "exponentially" at this point.
The last few iterations show a logarithmic curve at best tbh. If we are to see a major advance, it'll be something like the implementation and infrastructure for byte-level transformers.
People don't get that big labs actively want government regulation, not because they are genuinely concerned about AI misalignment. But because it is the 101 in how to achieve and crystalize oligopoly. What they want is "only the government and the big guys can work on AI", for the rest of us it would be illegal.
And they want Americans to be locked into paying 50 dollars per 1 million output tokens.
Not only that, they know that the real enemy of big Labs is not china is "home gpu/tpu" improvements. Without government intervention in a couple of years everyone could have their own fable like model at home. But of course big labs and government will not allow it never
On an unrelated side note, I wish we would start saying about "$X / megatoken" over "$X / million tokens".
No good reason really, it just sounds cooler.
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Fat government contracts, consulting, safety services, and exclusive tender access all follow from this regulation too.
The sensation I’m left with is a handful of goons making up new IPO math thanks to a specific constellation of political forces, using access and favour with those forces to bake themselves into the defence industry, and that the taxpayer and investor will be left holding the bag when reality rears its head. But in the short term, even as a clear ploy, it’s super profitable for all the oligarchs and hedge funds flush with recovery cash.
Like Enron, there was big profits to make if you knew what they were doing. Tinkerbell math with undeniable profit potential for a select few.
> OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence
Why would they sell there services to Palantir and/or to the military then?
Because the US military and it's contractors are good?
"Why did they open an orphanage instead of pouring acid into a town water tower?!?"
> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.
They don't. LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence and everyone working on LLMs knows this (with a few eccentric exceptions).
> LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence
The "never superintelligence" part I'll buy, though only in the sense of sample efficiency and generalisation ("quality superintelligence"), as they clearly have a superhuman breadth of skills, and run at superhuman speed.
"Never" out-of-control is obviously falsified by the already existing headlines about times they've gone out of control… in part, in some cases, because of their superhuman speed.
They've never gone out of control. All those headlines are cases where humans deliberately relinquished control.
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"LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence" might be relevant if there weren't many hundreds of researchers working (at OpenAI, Anthropic and elsewhere) on AI designs not based on the transformer (LLM) architecture.
People are working on lots of things all the time, so far, nothing has approached the efficacy of the transformer architecture.
LLMs didn't emerge by chance, they are the culmination of decades of research intersecting with brute force engineering rigor in a perfect storm of innovation. You're not just going to stumble into an alternative approach by dumping loads of cash into research.
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> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.
And then somehow came to conclusion that the only way to address that risk was to go ahead and spend a gigantic amount of effort and resources to build exactly that superintelligence...
> The idea that AI companies scaremonger to sell models is a silly meme.
> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.
This is not a contradiction.
These things can all be true:
1. That they were afraid of ASI
2. That they continue to be afraid of ASI
3. That they recognize that LLMs aren't in fact a path to ASI
4. That the current models aren't the existential danger they'd have us believe
5. That they're claiming they are because it makes for good marketing
I put very little weight behind any of those fearful statements made years ago. I assume leaders of those companies are fairly smart and rational, and there's no rational explanation for them running companies building the very thing they (supposedly) genuinely believe could kill us all.
I don't doubt they may have held genuine fears in the past, but those are long gone by now.
> we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere
GPT-2 was too dangerous to be released.
We can argue about sincerity, but I don't think we can argue about utter historical incompetence in assessing the risks. It's one or the other.
Either way the evidence seems to indicate we should not listen to AI companies about the risks of AI. Which is not to say that there aren't risks, just that the dealer is the least credible review.
> GPT-2 was too dangerous to be released.
No, it was "let's set a precident while these things are not too dangerous, c'mon guys we know y'all can reproduce this easily".
GPT-2 was absolutely too dangerous to release at the time OpenAI made that statement. It’s only safe now because the specific risks they cited were dependent on the public’s lack of knowledge that such systems existed.
bro, it was literally incomprehensibly retarded.
Of all the frontier labs, Anthropic has been the most creative in its marketing. I really, really don't put it beyond them for this to be one big crazy stunt.
Besides, when has the US government been known to do things like this proactively? The phone call came from inside the house.
Not at all. The writing is on the wall, and they want you to be locked into paying absurd subscription rates for neutered models while they internally use all of that money to run the unrestricted models to clone all of our businesses and swallow the economy. It really does not take a genius to see the long term play by Anthropic. They're a scummy company and have done everything in their power to lead to a scenario like this, but this isn't the exact scenario they bargained for because it affects their own employees and big foreign buyers. Instead, they'd rather have all of the decision making power themselves.
> Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.
I'd say their pecuniary interest is a reason one might plausibly doubt their sincerity, as are their continued efforts to build and sell access to the tools.
> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.
Ironic then, that both companies are in an out-of-control race to create a superintelligence.
How is it ironic to believe in a risk that actualizes
> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence
this means nothing
> Whether you agree or not, we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere.
If you want to be taken seriously, provide data, proof, so that any outside observer can independently come to the same conclusion instead of taking your word for it. Asking people to trust you for [reasons?] and that you somehow for some reason are right and the other is wrong regardless of if they agree or not. This is the imposition of a viewpoint instead of winning your case, which is not a sensible point of view, and definitely not how you influence opinions.
Yes we do. Dario said GPT2 is too dangerous to release. He’s dishonest since that’s obviously not true. This theater is about holding onto power and control. And about limiting competition.
Yes it is funnily true but it was for fake news generation and not it's cyber capabilities.
Another fun little gem of information, government has something called Mayhem
> the autonomous Robo-Hacker AI called Mayhem that’s now in charge of protecting the Pentagon’s most critical systems
Guess Mythos and Mayhem had a chat
It was about spam and scam generation which mostly was true as we can see...
These can be both true:
- there are people who are sincerely concerned about model safety who work at OpenAI and Anthropic
- there are people who are using this concern to generate fear to sell a product who work at OpenAI and Anthropic
It makes sense to be cognizant of the apparent conflict of interest and not take things that at face value, especially when there is so much money involved.
what a profoundly unaware comment
they are more than happy to build the things for themselves
it is all two-faced behavior of the exact kind of manipulators that crave power
I wish I were this naive.
If I remember correctly, the original GPT was considered too dangerous to release to the wild.
With hindsight, does that hold? If not, then how would we know a model is truly dangerous to release?
Sincerity does not determine whether an individual is scaremongering.
We can argue over the definition of scaremongering and what people we’ve never met “really think”, or we can argue over what the actual risks of AI are. I know which one I’d prefer…
I mean it kinda does.
I believe some people at these companies are sincere sure, but the CEOs, the investors, your sam altmans etc, the marketing talk.
Hell no, can’t trust a single word.
No reason except what comes from a bit of critical thinking.
What do they stand to gain by fearmongering their models as powerful threats? Clout, funding, fanfare, discussion, limelight, funding, funding, stronger IPO, valuation, funding.
What cybersecurity threshold was crossed by mythos that wasn't already crossed by 4.8/5.5? Crickets from 99% of those who have had access.
Have they pulled the same stunts multiple times before with previous models? Check.
You're blind if you dont think that greed and marketing are behind most things you see and hear about when gigantic corporations are involved.
I don't think anthropic or OAI are evil, but its clear both have contracts/connections with Dod and/or Palantir. Both are powered largely by greed still. If you actually want an example of these sincere founders you think OAI/anthropic are run by... look at Ilya at SSI or something. Please open your eyes and stop spreading your opinions on things you clearly have no clue about.
Their marketing reinforces the previous post though.
Going for months claiming how good mythos is for security cuz too powerful is their own making.
It's not. I got articles this year in my feed citing heads of OpenAI and Anthropic about the threat of AI and how they're addressing it.
>> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.
Oh please. Do people really believe this or shit like "Don't do evil". Companies get founded by all kind of people and ideals. They all go out the window quickly.
Why are they both rushing to IPO now then?
Some people do. Read the extropian newsletters from the 90s.
How do you know what the founders sincerely believe?
They said why they think it’s a sincere belief: past statements from before the AI hype cycle took off. I take it you have other evidence?
Things can change, and if you know pushing the metaphorical red button brings your company more attention, then you press that button everytime.
So if I claim I am a communist who doesn't want to ever get rich and then someone dangles a billion shiny dollars in front of me to just simply grab and own, you think I'd still be a communist then?
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OpenAI was, but didn't all those people then leave for Anthropic?
I am biased but I think if they really believed what they were saying, they would be a lot more humble about it.
I suspect what happened is the classic problem: you were sincere, then someone showed you a pile of money bigger than you could possibly imagine and you started to make excuses - Anthropic has a lot of EA people, so the excuse "Imagine how many lives you could save with this much money"[0] is very tempting, especially if all you have to do is diverge slightly from your plan.
[0]: the excuse is even true! You can get a lot of malaria nets/vaccines for 1 million.
Look into the history of Sam Altman and his ventures. He sincerely only believes in lying about his companies to investors like he did with Loopt.
He is not even a researcher or an engineer.
And Dario broke up with OpenAI and founded Anthropic because he didn't like Sam's and OpenAI's vision.
"founded by people who believe..." is doing a lot of work and it is hard to believe that in ernest given the sketchy past of the same people.
Most original higher up people who cared about safety and allignment in OpenAI have left.
It can be both.
The amount of self-confidence and belief it takes to get a company through the funding rounds and burn through borrowed money to rise to the top requires an absurd amount of self-delusion.
The clear historical record seems to indicate we've got a bunch of pathological liars trying to automate pathological lying.
Ah yes we are being told to believe in sincerity of people running trillion dollar corporations.
You're saying "this is normal" without making an argument that it's sensible.
I mean this earnestly: is this copy?
Just like Trump sincerely believed he won the 2020 election.
> we have no reason to believe their statements about risks are insincere
Why? Because they said it a few times? Then if they know the risk, why do they still making it? Comes out the "some one will do it eventually, better be us 'good' people to do it first" talking point?
See? It is a marketing strategy after all. These all talks, it's all to fit themselves into the "'good' people" narrative. It's a centuries old strategy to shield it's user from responsibilities while luring the support from the stupid.
However, the most harmful damage, which is mass layoffs, is already partially done. This could really kill, a massive genocide even, by making people jobless and potentially incomeless. And it is shown that these tech CEOs, they don't care any bit of that beyond the point "I've already told you so".
yes, yes, and Apple forbids sideloading because they're worried about grannies installing malware.
[dead]
There is a huge difference between the company founder saying something like that and the us government saying so.
"Our product is so good the US had to make it illegal for foreigners" is a hell of a marketing slogan.