Comment by deepwoods

6 hours ago

I agree with this take. Regardless of whether you think they're right, most everyone at Anthropic is acting in good faith. If this is an intentional media campaign it is a remarkably sloppy one. It has been effective because if you tell people they're going to die, they tend to pay attention - think of the grip the 2011 Harold Camping rapture prediction had on our collective psyche, or the 2012 apocalypse. But the messaging is inconsistent, the target audience is unclear, the stated goals are muddy, the whole thing is packaged in dense SF-speak, it's just a mess from a comms perspective. That doesn't suggest to me that this is a concerted effort to enable regulatory capture. Perhaps there are some cynics among the executives and the investors who are happy it's happening to the extent it brings about regulatory capture, but nobody seems to be pulling the strings.

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deepwoods

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ElProlactin  4 hours ago

> Regardless of whether you think they're right, most everyone at Anthropic is acting in good faith.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Dario Amodei is a 40-something dude who is obviously very, very intelligent. But intelligence is not wisdom and his "essay" here can easily be read as someone who opened a can of worms and doesn't know (or can't accept) that he won't be able to put the worms back in. But he's going to try because he believes he owes it to humanity to try.

It's hubris in its most basic form, even if the guy who has it looks nice and wears shawl-collar sweaters.

  • deepwoods  3 hours ago

    I see what you mean. I meant more that they genuinely believe the tech is dangerous, not that they are necessarily doing the right thing.

Miraste  2 hours ago

I think you're right, and that's worse.

This disaster of a PR strategy is not going to produce the outcomes Dario says he wants. It's going to make people hate him. Most importantly for his goals, it's going to make Chinese labs hate him--and they already hate him, because he treats them as basically terrorists. So if there is a "pacing", it won't include China, and thus may as well not happen.

That leaves only two conclusions, and really only one:

Dario believes what he says about safety, but does not understand politics and is prone to very counterproductive action, and therefore can't be trusted at the helm of a leading AI company.

or

Dario is lying about his goals, and therefore also can't be trusted.