Comment by tripleee

1 month ago

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.

  • 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

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.