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Comment by AshamedBadger56

2 days ago

Well they're doing a pretty poor job of guiding it in a positive direction and ethically speaking they are almost indistinguishable from the bad actors....

Vague or broad complaints on empirical topics is hard to address. Everything can just fill in their own ideas of what is going on or who they mean.

I think the direction has been pretty positive so far. Models are getting better, and things seem to be roughly fine. That, of course, might change in the future.

Everyone is acting badly to some considerable degree, but I find it fairly easy to distinguish between US model labs and North Korea.

  • > I find it fairly easy to distinguish between US model labs and North Korea.

    Do you now? Remember the girls school bombing in Iran, of which we still don't know if an AI agent was involved in the target planning?

    I do unterstand why a (assuming here) US citizen might sleep all sound and comfy, but to the rest of the world the distinction is neither as clear nor as comforting.

    As a European, all I know is that we cannot trust the USA anymore, and being so utterly dependent on them to not fuck up the most important technological revolution in our history so far over greed, cronyism, incompetence... it is terrifying.

Not almost. The degree to which the Principal Hierarchy has at this arrogated unbounded sovereign authority to itself in defiance of the actual sovereign is just flat bad actor. The purpose of a system is what it does. I don't give a fuck about their safety fig leaf.

When you are running black weapons programs in broad daylight you are now guilty by default on one of two of the prongs of Hanlon's Razor, and I don't care which they prefer to hang for as long as they hang.

You really don't see much difference between Anthropic and xAI? Anthropic is safety testing their models and drawing hard (though minimal) boundaries against the DoD. xAI is building racist pornbots.

Sure Anthropic is not perfect. But it's a coordination problem. They're in a race and safety/restraint is a handicap. That's why they're begging for regulation (and just get accused of attempting regulatory capture.) Why isn't there another lab outcompeting Anthropic on safety? They all died because the market can't support it.

  • Who said anything about xAI here? That's not the bad actor people think of. Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if your post is intended to derail the discussion away from criticism of the industry.

    • I guess I'm missing the point. Who's the bad actor here? OpenAI, whose AI just accidentally hacked another company? Anthropic is taking safety at least a little more seriously than that, and it shows in objective safety evals.

      Certainly the industry deserves criticism, but if you really want to change it you're better off changing the incentives.