Consider how much money is at stake: some industries have leveraged their power to lobby for bombing entire countries or topple regimes across the world for much less.
Creating an industry around an elusive concept of safety to force regulatory capture seems pretty straightforward to me.
Ok but Dario has been thinking about AI Safety since 2016 [1], before even GPT-1. I think the simplest explanation is that the Anthropic folks genuinely believe what they say, it just happens to also help their business a lot.
Consider how much money is at stake: some industries have leveraged their power to lobby for bombing entire countries or topple regimes across the world for much less.
Creating an industry around an elusive concept of safety to force regulatory capture seems pretty straightforward to me.
It's standard regulatory capture.
You don't say "let's ban my competitor".
You say "let's create laws that make it uneconomical for my competitor to access the market".
Indeed. It's transparent and ham-fisted. I think it may cost him in the future.
People clown on Alex Karp for his unedited maniacal "crashouts", but this is a real public crashout that made it past a team of publicists.
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is it opportunistic though, or planned from day one? The safety narrative has been there since the beginning
I mean... I'm not even extraordinarily cynical about this stuff, but to me this seems like a totally normal level of corporate gamesmanship?
Companies look for and seek to maintain competitive moats. This is not particularly clever, it's a core part of corporate strategy.
It's also highly unethical (for some values of ethics)
of course, but the safety angle was pushed from day one. I more mean the forethought of how it would play out
Ok but Dario has been thinking about AI Safety since 2016 [1], before even GPT-1. I think the simplest explanation is that the Anthropic folks genuinely believe what they say, it just happens to also help their business a lot.
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06565
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Does this really seem exceedingly clever and hard to foresee to you? To me, it seems like a pretty standard regulatory capture strategy.
This doesn't even mean that they're wrong about the risks or that they're lying. But surely all the investors understood this factor in their moat.