Comment by spwa4
2 hours ago
> What do you think would be the benefit of them stopping if others race ahead?
AI is a direct threat to people on many fronts. Jobs. AI datacenters. The AI bubble (and the inevitable crash). Electricity and even energy prices to an extent. Water. OpenAI and Anthropic are responsible for this evolution, and them stopping solves close to 50% of the problem, and even if you don't believe the number is that high, it's still a start.
> I believe they think slowing can only be coordinated from the frontier or via government, and stopping would lose any leverage they have to help coordinate that.
Oh, so they're killing people's opportunities and jobs because they want to help people? How is that any argument?
Yes, doing the moral thing means making a sacrifice. If you only want to do the moral thing if and only if it is advantage for you that makes you immoral, despite how your actions look. Big tech are masters at this.
The clearest limit right now is GPUs, and anyone giving up their allocation will be rerouted elsewhere in the world (NVIDIA is already sold out for the next year). I think you're underestimating competitiveness of the current market if you think Anthropic stopping right now wouldn't be absorbed by all others reasonably quickly. Your 50% figure is highly doubtful if you see how many players there are now.
Your idea of "making a start" (giving up their position) also would mean they couldn't really do anything else to solve the problem afterwards(?). Sometimes you can improve what's happening in a room more by staying in that room.
> Oh, so they're killing people's opportunities and jobs because they want to help people?
To be clear: Dario has talked about worries of jobs etc in the past, wanting society to prepare more for it, but the safety issues they're talking about with pacing seem to be focused more on their existential/AGI worries, not jobs/electricity etc. If someone truly believes in the existential worries (which they seem to: they wrote and published about it long before Anthropic was founded, and have directly made costly decisions based on it, like blocking their own models' capabilities) it trumps the other worries for them. At least that's my reading.
To be fair, there are other accelerators beyond GPUs, and the sooner people broaden out from nVidia and unlock a more open, more competitive ecosystem, the better. Allowing one company to control the flow of such a critical resource is just asking for problems.