Comment by Jcampuzano2
16 hours ago
If someone is genuinely afraid of this, they wouldn't IPO in the first place. All the talk in the article about commercial incentives means nothing when the company plans to IPO and become beholden to investors.
16 hours ago
If someone is genuinely afraid of this, they wouldn't IPO in the first place. All the talk in the article about commercial incentives means nothing when the company plans to IPO and become beholden to investors.
Aren't they beholden to investors already? Why would an IPO make a big difference?
In any case, if they need to IPO in order to survive as a company, then bringing in regulators to act as a counterweight against commercial pressures makes a lot of sense to me.
If anything, his entire argument leads to the eventual premise that AI labs need to nationalize.
He is already arguing that commercial competition creates dangerous incentives, and that labs cannot slow down because competitors may overtake them. He also asks for what would boil down to significant government intervention to preserve a Western lead.
If this is true, why preserve the commercial incentive? The U.S. government would already have the necessary goal of remaining ahead of China and other competitors. Why not remove entirely domestic race for market share, valuation, and investor returns rather than keeping private labs in competition and then asking regulators to counterbalance the incentives that competition creates.
That doesn't mean nationalization would be better, but given the severity of the risks he describes to national security, it seems like an obvious conclusion that nationalization is the eventual end result of the argument.
I don't agree that the argument implies nationalization. Regulation would work if it slowed everyone down at the same rate, enough to mitigate the risks. The problem is that you need regulators who know what they're doing and strong international cooperation. If you regulate a fraction of the global market, you just create an incentive to shift development to other countries. Nationalization, being essentially the most heavy-handed form of regulation, faces the same problems and comes with its own risks as well.
We're talking about this like all of the bad incentives are created by market competition, but that's not really the case. Most of the incentives come from untapped value in the form of potential profits, strategic advantage, military superiority, etc. Corporations and governments want to capture this value for themselves, creating various types of competition. Dario's argument depends on the assumption that the primary risk comes from the pace of development and threats from the technology itself. That's probably where I disagree the most; I think the highest risk is rising authoritarianism and competition between nation states. Slowing down isn't really a solution to those problems.
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Interesting points, but given Dario's previous conflicts with the DoD, I doubt he has a ton of faith in the current US administration.
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Assuming they can achieve funding without IPO probably yes. But if they can't there's always the dilemma that "if [good guys] won't do it then [bad guys] will". I'd like to think that the leadership at anthropic is principled even if the actions of the company as a whole has been less than stellar morally speaking. I'd be curious to see their moral calculus transparently laid out in public.
We are still living in a capitalistic society. We have to find a solution which is responsible, safe and returns on the investment. The commercial aspect can be true at the same time.
The potential of AI may give us the opportunity to graduate to a post-capitalism, or to move to a sort of neo-capitalism, which is governed by different rules.
Capitalism thrives in the realm where there is a scarcity of resources, either physical or informational. Imagine breakthroughs in energy science such that the cost of energy drops to zero, which means the cost of physical resources declines precipitously. Ok so where is the capital now? Must we retain a model based on the premise of scarce physical capital?
you are imagining magic as a reason to dump all your money and future money into a casino. You might instead consider joining the catholic church? they already have a free energy god that gives everything you could ever want
the cost of energy is already ~0 and people dont want it, and refuse to participate in letting other people have free energy if it affects their view of their pasture.
unless you are building killer robits with the intention of doing some soviet or nazi styled purges of everyone that might get in the way, you arent gonna get this ai utopia
Read other writing by Anthropic about potential future financial implications of AI. [1]
IPO is a vehicle for future wealth distribution. It leverages existing financial frameworks in order to span the gap from before-to-after without having to convince the system that future is inevitable.
[1] https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/files/4zrzovbb/website/9ea607a...
I don't think Anthropic and OpenAI will IPO at all. Word is that Anthropic will have $100 BN in revenues this year, and very likely OpenAI will get some similar amount. You IPO when you need money, and I think Anthropic and OpenAI are past that point.
They want to spend over $200B/year on $100B of revenue so they still need investment.
That level of revenue is apparently not enough for them to feel confident in the stability of their competitive position.
And how does an IPO address that?
You also IPO if your investors want to cash out.
>> ...and become beholden to investors
Anthropic is structured as a Public Benefit Corporation with a strong charter. In addition, founders will have super-voting shares and so it won't be possible to push them out. Therefore the whole "beholden to investors" thing is not a concern.
Don't underestimate the ability of the courts and the state to pull the rug out from under the legal system. Speaking as an outsider from Canada, it looks very much like all bets are off in terms of respecting checks and balances in the United States and it's very realistically possible that unless there is a big upset and turn around the next couple of years any traces of democracy in the US will be a farcical nod to what the founders built as a way to paper over the abuses.
I really hope I am wrong as my perspective is not anti-American, it's specifically anti-corruption and pro-democracy.
As long you are burning more cash than you bring in, you are beholden to investors - whether it is retail, VCs, banks or a government giving you a bailout it is still someone signing you a check.
Golden shares, vetos, PBC, charter are all paper tigers , they only matter if/when the firm is self-sustaining business with no outside capital needed, the alternative to not listening to investors till then is crash and burn.
After that point, you will have to listen to the paying customers (sometimes but not always they are also users ) as they are ones now funding your organization.
Bottom line you are always listening to someone.
google dropped "dont be evil" despite being the definition of the company
these are just words at a time and place.
sama showed that you can futz with it, and as long as you spend enough in court on judges, aint nobody gonna stop you
Ant: I'm doing very bad things right now, but I can't stop myself, you must stop me if you can. If you don't, that will be on you, not on me.
OAI: <silence>
Which is worse? I don't think they differ by much. It's just Capitalism, but accelerated.
From Jakub Pachocki, chief scientist at OpenAI last week: https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/
> Currently I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer. I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established. And I believe that international coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world.
It's almost like the people at Anthropic and other AI labs are slaves to a misaligned reward function that encourages optimization of a metric (profit) over human values, even at what they claim is the risk of extinction.
We built the paperclip maximizer, and it is capitalism.
> are slaves to a misaligned reward function that encourages optimization of a metric (profit) over human values, even at what they claim is the risk of extinction
This was already the case even before the "frontier AI" age. The big question is, will these glaring AI arms-race threats be obvious to enough people to rethink the underlying systemic flaw driving it all?
Not holding my breath on that one.