Comment by handoflixue
9 hours ago
The problem is when people use "we really believe it" as an excuse to do harm, which has not actually occurred here. Anthropic is not committing violence, they're not defrauding the population. They're sticking to both morality and the rules.
So... what, you just don't trust anyone good? Would it be better to pull in a health insurance CEO? They're happy to watch people die for profits, no concerns at all about them pulling a "greater good" card because they're in it for entirely selfish reasons.
> they're not defrauding the population.
Ehh, I think it's a lot more grey than "definitely not". It's hard to ignore that their claims that their model is so dangerous they can't widely release it is tantamount to declaring that they're in a league of their own and have to be treated with white gloves to prevent the sheer power of their model from shattering global prosperity.
This isn't the first time, and nothing bad has happened with the prior models. Every time it gets a little harder to believe that they believe in the threat, and makes it feel a little more like it's just to build hype. There's only so many times you can say "this model is a threat to the world", have it turn out to be nothing, and avoid people accusing you of lying to pump stock prices.
I think the second the company starts to classify "competition" as mis-use... the whole "they're not committing harm" line sort of goes out the window.
Modern society is built on the idea that competition is required from companies, and we seem to be exiting that age into a new world of monolithic, monopolistic, mega-corps. Personally, I find that a real route to dystopia.
Where do you draw the line here?
What happens when your car stops working because you're driving a tesla, but you're working on EVs for Honda or Ford?
What happens when your macbook stops working, because you decided to commit to changes to ARM software, or RISC-V?
---
And before you dismiss those, this is literally what Anthropic is doing TODAY. Using their tools to develop competing tools is something they classify as mis-use, and shut you down for doing.
Personally, I just can't accept that as a valid moral stance. Wonderfully successful, abusive, and dystopian? Absolutely. Moral? FUCK NO.
When tools turn themselves off because the manufacturer has decided it doesn't like how you're using them... you're a slave with no autonomy.
... you're perfectly welcome to compete with them, they're just not willing to provide their own product for that purpose. I also can't buy the schematics for Intel's latest chips, the source code for Windows, or a rocket from SpaceX to disassemble and study.
Like, there's a very critical point where you are asking to use their servers to directly compete with them.
This has been normal for somewhere between "decades" and "the entire history of commerce"
Incomparable domains. People routinely suffer illness. We can compare outcomes. These ideologues are building something completely unprecedented which, according to themselves apparently, can go paperclip-rogue if one is not careful. So the worst case is unprecedented. Then there is the more mundane matter of heating up the economy, something which also has no one blameworthy until any such supposed bubble actually pops.
> So... what, you just don't trust anyone good?
The baseline here is apparently that they are good, I’m just supposed to trust and shut up?
No, I'm saying they have an actual track record that you can evaluate, and if you do so you will see that they have killed approximately zero people, etc. etc.
Or even just propose an alternative: who has a better track record, here? Who DO you trust?