This is why I cancelled my chatgpt subscription and moved to claude. Its kinda silly, but I feel like the products are about equivalent for my use case so I'd rather do business with a company that is acting in good (better?) faith.

In the case they don't get high salaries from this activity, there is also a solution. The next step in ~10 years could be to offer their services to governments to offer "automated court decisions".

Then the people who funded / trained this "justice" out of their good heart, would actually have leverage, in terms of concrete power.

It's a much more subtle way to capture power, if you can replace the judges with your software.

I guess they can get them to rewrite the US Constitution to remove that pesky "fair trial" bit and, since they would control the narrative, delete 1000+ years of common law.

Brave new world, indeed...

Anthropic pays their engineers pretty well. They're doing just fine, at least for as long as people are pouring money into their company. But that's everyone in this space, isn't it?

Thanks but no thanks.

Don't think that's silly at all.

Hope not - I haven't purchased a Nestle brand in years for this exact reason.

That isn't silly, that's one of the only ways to exercise agency under hypercapitalism. I recently cancelled my Amazon Prime membership and got a Costco membership for the same reason. I don't get every product I want, but I'm also okay with that.

This has to be a meme. Costco is peak hypercapitalism lol.

Could you say more?

It's a 500B company that undercuts everyone else with incredible efficiency, just like Amazon. It's an example of how capitalism can be great. If you really want to get of out of capitalism, you can just buy directly from farmers or grow your own food.

The whole thing about no ethical consumption under capitalism is a just a way to enjoy the conveniences of capitalism on a moral high ground. It's totally doable, you just might not enjoy it haha.

I guess the angle I was coming at it from is that they pay their employees a living wage. I need to buy toilet paper from somewhere, and between Amazon and Costco I would much rather give my money to Costco.

The secret is buying a bidet so you dont need to buy from either ever again!

Hell, just buy from Wallyworld where you get low, low prices and pseudo-socialism with their employees on the food stamps.

The camel's gotta get its nose in the tent somehow.

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, but the practical upshot of this new "Public Benefit Corporation" thing, with or without a trust or non-profit attached, is that you can tell both the public and your investors to fuck off. The reason why all the big AI startups suddenly want to use it is because they can. Normally no sane investor would actually invest in such a structure, but right now the fear that you might be left out of the race for humanity's "last invention" is so acute that they do it anyway. But if Dario Amodei actually cared about humanity any more than Sam Altman, that would be the surprise of the year to me.

Can you imagine a hypothetical AI company that did care about humanity, and if so, how would it look different from Anthropic?

It wouldn't be doing this: https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a...

It wouldn't specifically brag about doing it, while leaving out that they were specifically dealing with Palantir, because they know what they're doing is unethical: https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-access-to-claude-fo...

Being available for use by militaries is incredibly irresponsible, regardless of what scope is specifically claimed, because of the inherent gravity of the situation when a military is wrong. The US military maintains a good deal of infrastructure in the US; putting into their hands an unreliable, incompetent calculator puts lives at risk.

It would be structured as a non-profit (there are no teeth to a PBC; the structure is entirely to avoid liability, and if you have no trust in the executive body of an organization, it has zero meaningful signal).

It would have a different leadership team.

It would have a leader who could steelman his own position competently. Machines of Loving Grace was less redeeming than Lenat's old stump speeches for his position, despite Amodei starting up in an industry significantly more geared for what he had to say, and Lenat having an incredibly flexible sense of morality. Its leader would not have a history working for Chinese companies and jingoistically begin advocating for export controls.

It would have different employees than the people I know who are working there, who have a history of picking the most unethical employers they can find, in a fashion not dissimilar to how Illumination Entertainment's "Minions" select employers.

You seem to misunderstand benefit corporations. They remain committed to profit and are just as subject to their board and officers as any other corporation.

There are sane investors that prefer investing in companies that adopt these corporate structures. Based on data, those investors see public benefit corporations as more profitable and resilient. They are able to attract employees and customers that would otherwise not be interested or might be less interested.

Put this and 'dont be evil' and 5 dollars in my hand and I'll give you a cup of coffee.

Coffee for $5? That's a steal in this economy!

The coffee is made with the assistance of AI, which means some nonzero portion will be something other than coffee, but at least it means every sip is an adventure.

This is one of the funniest takes on ai I've read, it could've been out of a videogame like the outer worlds with its absurd takes on crapitalism

It's not the best choice, it's spacer's choice!

Isn't there an SCP where occasionally it spits out liquid magma or strange matter or something?

The attempt is commendable, but the agency problem is well understood and none of these alternative structures have really solve for it.

> the agency problem is well understood

What is "the agency problem"?

Very generally it is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... ) about the conflict of interest between agent( people taking action) and principal (the entity or person on behalf of whom action is taken)

In modern management compensation theory (https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_introduction-to-economic... ) this is key to why executive compensation has increased much faster than workers in the last 50 years.

Stock based compensation mix evolved from this thesis, and quite common in the valley and why almost all OpenAI staff wanted Sam Altman back even though the non profit board did not.

Aligning key talent's compensation to enterprise value is only viable in unrestricted for profit entities any other structure with limits (capped profit, public benefit corporation, non profit, trust, 501c's etc) does not work as well.

Talent will then leave to a for-profit entity who can offer better compensation than a restricted entity can because they share a % of their enterprise value which restricted ones either cannot or not have same liquidity/value [1] etc.

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[1]This is why public companies are more valuable for RSU/options than private companies, and why cash flow positive companies like Stripe still raise private money to just give liquidity to employees .