Comment by gallerdude
6 hours ago
So let’s say you’re in Anthropic’s shoes. You see that LLM’s are getting better and better, and it’s very possible that they will have some impact on jobs in the next few years, and a very meaningful impact on cybersecurity.
Is it more ethical to stay silent about these concerns, as you might have a bit of self interest? Or even if it looks a bit self interested, is it better to warn people ahead of time? I think the latter is obviously the better position.
Are we really saying that Anthropic claiming AI would take over industries was some benevolent ethical move rather than marketing their product as a cheap replacement for human labor that works in any industry? Wouldn't the ethical thing, if they were actually concerned about labor displacement, be to shut down the lab and work to disrupt and disable other labs instead?
Oppenheimer believed that technological progress is inevitable: if something can be built it will be.
Anthropic (and Deepmind, and some at OpenAI) believe the same thing.
Their ethical argument is:
1) This technology is coming whether or not our company does it or not.
2) Strong AI needs to be under human control, and we are the best placed to develop techniques to make this happen.
To be very clear: Anthropic (at least) is very happy to restrict access to their best models. They have continually campaigned for regulation to make sure others have to do the same.
> Wouldn't the ethical thing, if they were actually concerned about labor displacement, be to shut down the lab and work to disrupt and disable other labs instead
Personally I strongly reject the idea that labor displacement is unethical.
It will be a serious problem to deal with, but that doesn't make it unethical.
The steam engine displaced labor. That doesn't make it unethical.
Was it more ethical for the boy who cried wolf to have cried wolf so many times that nobody believed him when a wolf finally did show up?
Be specific, what are you talking about. Industry has been continuously warning about many of the complex problems that are going to happen as a clear consequence of the technology. I don’t know of any problem they have talked about that hasn’t either already come to fruition in one sense or another or that just hasn’t yet arrived. Dario has been predicting the end of coding for a long time now and look where we already are.
So yea no it’s more like it’s important for industry leaders and those closest to model development to proactively identify the issues that they don’t have complete control over or that we don’t have a regulatory framework for.
Super puzzling to see these comments and of course with zero specifics just “they’re all liars and grifters”
The issue is both OpenAI and Anthropic have lied so many times that it’s no longer rational to take anything they say at face value.
Also: they don’t have to know they’re lying to say things that aren’t true. There is definitely some cult-like behaviour at the moment on the west coast
Be specific, what do you consider their lies to be? Also, this is pretty straightforward. You have a decade of extremely stable and predictable performance trajectory. It’s easy to see the writing on the wall. You can feel whatever which way about their motivations and ethics but if you read say Dario’s raw words they are pretty reasonable. We have to have a good regulatory framework and do what we can to prepare ourselves while also not ceding a critical strategic advantage. The west coast is always cult like, that’s not new. And it ignores the very real substance to the discussion.
I think that Anthropic is fully absolutely unethical. And they lied a lot. They were actively trying to make the doom happen while trying to cash out maximally on doom trolling.
If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people.
It really does not matter how much they believed own doom predictions, because they were actively trying to make them true whether realistic or not.
> They were actively trying to make the doom happen while trying to cash out maximally on doom trolling.
These words make no sense. Anthropic delayed mythos/fable rollout. A mythos model without safeguards would have been a pretty bad idea, and they sacrificed a ton of revenue and risked being scooped by any of the other labs in the meantime. Frontier models are only frontier temporarily until the next lab releases their model. Of course they are a company and need to act in their own best interest.
It is also clearly serious the problems we need to think about as we march quickly towards even more capable systems. Why on earth is it a problem to point this out?
> If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people.
What a really weird take; they employ some of the best safety and alignment teams in the industry and this is an active area of research that they are campaigning for more attention on. You complain about them “doom trolling” and then complain they don’t do anything about…the doom? No sense at all.
It is perfectly consistent to (1) sound an alarm and (2) March full steam ahead as quickly as they can. If they don’t do (1) that’s unethical. If they don’t do (2) someone else will. I would rather someone like Dario align these models than the CCC. Plus it would be nice not to have a war over Taiwan which is inevitable if China gains enough of the upper hand in this AI race.