Comment by sanderjd
1 month ago
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
Yeah I think this is right. The best setup is when a true belief aligns with a competitive moat.
I definitely believe that (to his credit!) Amodei is a true believer in safety. But I also think it was important for many of the deep pockets investors who have been involved in the company since early on to recognize that this would be a potentially defensible moat.
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That just shows how wrong he's been because there was nothing unsafe about AI in 2016. And the people theorizing about this stuff in the 20th century? I want to see what crazy code they were writing
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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.