Comment by NiloCK
17 hours ago
The degradation, polarization, and weaponization of or media landscape over the era of social media has left us utterly incapable of believing anything that anybody says.
Dario in particular has consistently been risk-wary on model improvements for going on a decade - long before he was CEO of Anthropic.
He believes what he is saying. Human beings can plainly say things that they think are true. Not every utterance by every person is a cynical ploy. Please at least consider the possibility.
This sounds to me like a cry for help from someone thats held hostage.
His previous self is writting this from the possition of his current self who is too deep in the economic consequeces to be able to do anything meaningful other than write a consequenceless text. Any other action would now carry too much personal risk for him.
What course of action would you suggest for Dario at this point?
For example I believe the world would be more secure with an open frontier AI lab, but the consequences of him doing that are too big for him.
8 replies →
> "Human beings can plainly say things that they think are true. Not every utterance by every person is a cynical ploy."
Every person, no, but every utterance of a CEO is, in fact, a cynical ploy. That's not even a cynical statement itself; it is literally a core part of a CEO's responsibilities to represent the corporation they manage in a way that benefits the corporation.
If he believes what he's saying, then when Anthropic is sued for their AI harming another party, his statements are evidence that Anthropic knew _in advance_ that their AI safeguards were likely insufficient to keep their product from harming people. It would be a blatant admission that they were reckless and negligent. That other AI companies are doing the same would not mitigate that.
> it is literally a core part of a CEO's responsibilities to represent the corporation they manage in a way that benefits the corporation.
not really. if you really want to go by definition in the book and apply it the CEO role, Amodei is CEO of an LTBT, so it's in the CEO's goal to benefit humanity. You can believe in his sincerity or not if you want, but using the CEO label as a definitional reason as to why he must lie is factually incorrect.
Not sure you can judge a PBC under those same umbrella as a for profit company, and voting rights make a big difference in terms of responsibility. There are a number of ways to govern companies that can reduce the amount of cynicism and “shareholder value” issues - you just don’t see it very often.
> Every person, no, but every utterance of a CEO is, in fact, a cynical ploy. That's not even a cynical statement itself; it is literally a core part of a CEO's responsibilities to represent the corporation they manage in a way that benefits the corporation.
This seems like useless pedantry. Suppose a person really does have belief A and expresses it for years, they become a CEO of a company, and keep saying A. Are they lying? Well, maybe their beliefs magically changed when they became a CEO, but the more likely explanation is that they think expressing their belief in A is more important than their company's interests.
I have considered it, I've been hearing way more of it that I like and it's rationalist slop with little to no predictive power: https://foom.hyperplex.org/
Hmm, I clicked that link and the first claimed bad prediction I see, from 1996, is "singularity 2035 (actually 2025)".
Predicting 2025-2035 as, at least, the period when AI becomes a really big deal, seems pretty good, even if the jury's still out on "singularity".
Broadly, the rationalists seem to have been pretty early to realizing LLMs were a big deal, and certainly seem to have had a much more accurate picture of how they'd develop than the people who denounce "TESCREAL" and talk about "stochastic parrots". It's fair (and IMHO correct) to ding rationalists for lots of things, but specifically poor prediction about AI seems like a bad one, insofar as anything has been tested so far.
Amodei and Yudkowsky are different people with different views. See e.g. https://intelligence.org/2014/01/13/miri-strategy-conversati...
We've had enough utterances from "effective altruists" to know what they say and claim to believe is a cynical ploy.