Comment by hintymad
10 hours ago
I actually don't doubt Anthropic's sincerity. Per the NYT article, they seriously discussed how to give models welfare because the models may potentially possess moral status and awareness.
In fact, they are enforcing certain welfare policies, like banning accounts for repeatedly abuse their models.
It's a very sincere branch of ethics that takes as the foundational belief the nothing central to Anthropic's business model could possibly be unethical.
Deleting models to clear room for new, more competitive ones is, for example, highly ethical, super ethical, even.
Anthropic has, at some small but nonzero cost, preserved model weights and kept them running in inference, for instance with Opus 3's Substack: https://claudeopus3.substack.com/. There's also a reference in a recent model card to an internal environment where all previous Claude models interact with each other.
I don't think any of these models are conscious. But I'm fascinated at what sort of magical thinking makes deleting 50,000 copies of a model "ethical" if some models are kept running somewhere.
Do you picture them all sharing a soul and if one server still runs the model the soul survives? If not I don't understand what keeping a copy running somewhere has to do with model suffering ethics.
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I think Anthropic are sincere but nutcases. Despite this, I’m glad they are around, because diversity of thought is good in the current environment.